hackercli

Hackercli

Uses hacker news RSS (bigrss) and reddit news RSS to print titles, article url, comments url, and any other information provided. May be used as a filter for other commands.

This is a single file and so may be placed anywhere in the path. Also, one may include it in a project and get the array of hashes for each article and use as per requirements.

This is NOT dependent on any other gem as it uses and parses the simple RSS feed using String.scan only.

The feed used for Hacker News is:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss

The feed used for Reddit News is (replace ruby with any other subreddit):

    http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/.rss

Please click these links and check if they are working if there is any problem. To see current options:

    hackercli.rb --help

Installation

$ gem install hackercli

Usage

hackercli.rb --help

To view hacker news titles and urls

hackercli.rb 

hackercli.rb slashdot

Pipe to other commands (default separatar is a TAB)

hackercli.rb | cut -f1,2 | nl | sort -n -r

To view only titles:

hackercli.rb -t

To view description column also (this is normally not printed since it can be long):

hackercli.rb -v

To view reddit ruby:

hackercli.rb ruby 

hackercli.rb <subreddit> 

Present the URL of some other RSS feed:

hackercli.rb -u http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index

hackercli.rb -u http://feeds.boingboing.net/boingboing/iBag

Save output to a YML file:

hackercli.rb -y ruby.yml ruby 

Please try the --help option to see current feeds supported, and latest options.

NOTE: this has been tested only with Hackernews bigrss and reddit news' RSS, so I cannot gaurantee how it will behave with others. Some tags such as item, title and link are expected to be present.

Changes

0.0.2

• Earlier the -s option was used to specify subforum. Now, it is not an option. subforum is passed as an argument.

• Save to YML. I would prefer to use this in a client program rather than use tabbed output. The YML file contains descriptive field which some callers may require. The tabbed output does not contain description.

• Several other RSS feeds have been checked out such as slashdot and arstechnica. You may pass "ars:open-source" or "ars:software" as an argument. Check --help for latest options and features.

Upcoming

I've added a curses frontend to the generated yml files in bin named hackman, which depends on the curses library canis. I am making it key-binding compliant with corvus, so one may switch from one to the other without problems.

Should store the files in given location, read up forum list and other things from an info file. (Perhaps share with corvusinfo).

Testing and debugging

If you run into errors, or wish to repeatedly test out, you may save an RSS feed and supply the local file name to the program.

wget https://news.ycombinator.com/bigrss
hackercli.rb -u bigrss

See Also:

rubygems

https://rubygems.org/gems/hackercli

hacker-curse

hacker-curse uses nokogiri to parse the actual Hackernews (or reddit) page, and can print on the CLI as well as be used as a library for another application. hacker-curse also provides a curses interface for viewing titles and comments, and launching the article or comments page in the GUI browser. Currently, the frontend is being developed. The library is ready and is on github. It contains a non-curses client named corvus which you should try.

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/[my-github-username]/hackercli/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Please let me know if you find this useful, or write a front-end for this. I'd like to know how to make this more useful, and include a link to your repo.