I was kicking around university the other day when I ran into a guy who was signing up to have dictionary.coms word of the day emailed to him every day. This seemed like a very wasteful cluttering of the inbox to me and I thought this could be achieved a lot better by having a Gtk/perl script pop up the info every day.. The other night I got bored and nocked up a script. I am but a newcomer to the holy temple so please monks be hard of me and tell me how I could do this better... Here is what I came up with: 
#!/usr/bin/perl
#
#   Word Of The Day Catching Script...
#   (V0.1)
#   Joe Higton
#
#  And hey I was half asleep when I wrote this....
#
#  Gets the word of the day from www.dictionary.com
#
#
 


use Gtk;
use HTTP::Lite;

init Gtk;

sub msbox{
    # Display some info. Nicely. Ish.
    my ($title, $message) = @_;

    my $scroller = new Gtk::ScrolledWindow;
    my $window = new Gtk::Window;
    my $label = new Gtk::Label;
    my $button = new Gtk::Button("OK");
    my $pack  = new Gtk::Packer;
    
    
    $window->set_title($title); 
    $window->set_default_size(400,340);
    $window->signal_connect( "destroy" => \&Gtk::main_quit);
    $button->signal_connect( "clicked" => \&Gtk::main_quit);

    $label->set_justify(left);
    $label->set_text($message);
    $scroller->add_with_viewport($label);
    
    $pack->add_defaults($scroller,-top,-center,[-fill_x,-fill_y,-expan
+d]);
    $pack->add_defaults($button,-bottom,-center,[-fill_x,-fill_y]);
    
    $window->add($pack);
    $window->show_all();
}


$http = new HTTP::Lite;
$req = $http->request("http://www.dictionary.com/wordoftheday/") 
    or die "Couldn't retrieve the Word Of The Day.";

# Ok grab the important bit of the web page. Handily kept between two 
+comments.
$http->body() =~ /<!-- Begin content -->(.*)<!--End content-->/s;
$wod = $1;

# Capture the actual word its self from the cunning comment..
$wod =~ /<!-- WOTD="(.*)" -->/;
$theword =$1;

#Kill that HTML! I actually stole this regex off perlmonks
# because I was too bloody tired to think of one of my own at the
#time..
$wod =~ s/<(?:[^>'"]*|(['"]).*?\1)*>//gs;

#Fire all that off into a nice window..
msbox("The Word Of The Day IS: $theword",$wod);

Gtk->main();

[download]
"blue berry muffins are not just a snack.... ..they are a way of life"

Edit: chipmunk 2001-06-21

In reply to Dictionary.com (PLEASE critisise...) by Draxil

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