A PHP script to generate a random blogpost.

markov.php

<?php

// Where to find the blog posts
$sources = '_posts/2015/**.md';

$files = glob($sources);

$startWords = [];
$allWords = [];

echo "Loading "  . count($files) . " files\n";
foreach($files as $file) {

    loadFile($file);

}

echo "Loaded " . count($allWords) . " words\n";

$count = 20;
echo "Generating post...\n";

 echo generatePost();

function loadFile($filename) {

    // Yuck
    global $startWords, $allWords;

    $source = file_get_contents($filename);

    // Stripping frontmatter. This is a markdown/jekyll thing
    list(,,$source) = explode("---\n", $source, 3);

    $lastWord = null;
    foreach(explode(' ', $source) as $word) {

        //$word = strtolower($word);
        //$word = trim($word,'.?!,;');
        //if (!preg_match('/^[a-z]+$/', $word)) continue;

        if ($lastWord === null) {
            // Counting starting words for blog posts
            if (isset($startWords[$word])) {
                $startWords[$word]++;
            } else {
                $startWords[$word] = 1;
            }

        } else {
            // We count every word based on which word came
            // before it.
            if (!isset($allWords[$lastWord][$word])) {
                $allWords[$lastWord][$word] = 1;
            } else {
                $allWords[$lastWord][$word]++;
            }

        }
        if (!isset($allWords[$word])) {
            $allWords[$word] = [];
        }
        $lastWord = $word;

    }

}

function generatePost() {

    global $startWords, $allWords;

    // Get the first word
    $word = getWeightedRandom($startWords);
    $post = $word;

    while(true) {

        // All the potential next words
        $nextWords = $allWords[$word];
        if (!$nextWords) {
            break;
        }
        
        $word = getWeightedRandom($nextWords);
        $post.=' ' . $word;

    }
    return $post; 

}


function getWeightedRandom(array $array) {

    $no = mt_rand(1, array_sum($array));
    foreach($array as $value => $weight) {
        $no -= $weight;
        if ($no < 1) {
            return $value;
        }
    }

}

https://github.com/mdwheele/marky ! 😄 Does character-level, which would probably be hilarious for this... would take many more pre-flight adjustments, I'm sure haha.