Following talk in the CB today, I started poking through the latest XML ticker, which shows the list of all monks at the monastery. I was struck by how many of the usernames were similar to real words. Combining that with my wish to play with Text::Soundex gave me..

The wonderful toy of Monastery::Monkify. It changes every word into a link to the home node of a monk with a similar name. Unfortunatly, Text::Soundex isn't picky enough to get really good matches, but it's still fun. Anyways, the code:

use strict;
use Text::Soundex;
use LWP::Simple;
use HTML::Entities;
$Text::Soundex::nocode = 'Z000';
$| = 1;
print "Loading..";
my @nodes = map {($_)=/"([^"]+)"/;defined($_)?[$_,soundex($_)=~/(.)(.{
+3})/]:['','Z',0]}
          split /\n/, get 'http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=74291';
print "Done.\n";
s/(\w+)/bestfit($1)/ge, print while <>;

sub bestfit {
  my($word) = @_;
  my @se = soundex($word)=~ /(.)(.{3})/;
  return "[nodereaper|$word]" if join('',@se) eq 'Z000';
  my @found = sort {abs($se[1]-$a->[2]) <=> $se[1]-$b->[2]} grep {$se[
+0] eq $_->[1]} @nodes;
  return "[".decode_entities $found[rand(grep {$found[0][2] == $_->[2]
+} @found)]->[0]."|$word]";
}
[download]

Note: I'm doing a somewhat evil thing here, by processing XML using regexes. I'm forced to do this, however, because the "XML" node in question isn't actually XML -- it has non-XML entities. Ah, well..

 
perl -e 'print "I love $^X$\"$]!$/"#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'