A recent posting by MrCromeDome showed a quick CUFP-type script to generate random silliness, presumably to badger cow-orkers. Being in a refactoring mood, I thought that it might be better if you could describe your "remark" in a text file. This would be used as a template for generating messages, not unlike your typical "mad-lib". Since it's just a text file, it can be edited by mere mortals without fear of compilation errors.

In this file, there would be two kinds of replacements: Automatic, where a word is picked from a list of possibilities, and prompted, where the user has to answer a question. Here's an example which incorporates both types using a very basic tagging system:

When I was walking down the [street|boulevard|avenue] a large
[squirrel|frog|lemur|llama] [leaped|jumped|ran|crawled] out and
[bit|mauled|chewed|spit at] me!
You'd never believe what [Name?] said!
[download]

When this is run, you'd see something that looks like this, plus or minus input and random factors:

% perl madlib sample.madlib
Name? George Jetson
When I was walking down the avenue a large llama jumped out
and bit me!
You'd never believe what George Jetson said!
[download]

If you're probably thinking this is a couple of simple regexes, you're not entirely wrong. However, to spice things up, there's a few "rules" about how the program runs:

• It reads in any template(s) provided on the command line (i.e. @ARGV). All files specified must exist. No error handling required.
• Prompt the user for their input before sending any output. Note that there should be a space after the question mark, even though it's not explicitly in the file.
• Prompts are sent to STDERR, output to STDOUT. This way you get a clean copy of the output with no prompts when you redirect.
• No need for strict or -w compliance. Hack mode is on.

As food for thought, here's my first take at 159 characters, not including linebreaks to suppress the red plus marks:

select STDERR;$|++;select STDOUT;$_=join('',<>);
s#\[([^\]]*\?)\]#print STDERR"$1 ";chomp($i=<STDIN>);$i#ge;
s#\[([^\]]*)\]#@f=split(/\|/,$1);$f[rand@f]#ge;print
[download]

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