UPDATE: Dec 19,2005 I put this to midi music in a karaoke file !! Just in time for the christmas parties. :-) See karaoke files for the midis, and the Perl scripts which generate the midi(kar) files.(Thanks to Mr. Muskrat :-) )

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my @gifts = <DATA>;
my @days = qw(1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 11th 12th);
my @dayspast;

while(@days){
   my $day = shift @days;
   push @dayspast, $day;
   my ($num) = $day =~ /(\d+).*/;

print "On the $day day of Christmas,\nMy true Perl gave to me\n";
  foreach my $gift (reverse @dayspast){
       my ($n) = $gift =~ /(\d+).*/;
       print $gifts[$n - 1];
   }
 print "\n";
 if(scalar @dayspast == 1) {$gifts[0] = 'And '.$gifts[0]}
}
exit;
__DATA__
a commandline in an @ARGV
2 sca-lars
3 ar-rays
4 nested hash
5 ENCODED STRINGS
6 threads-a-spawning
7 procs-a-forking
8 tests succeeding
9 modules loading
10 objects blessing
11 signals catching
12 saints-a-drinking

[download]
I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: 12 Days of Christmas
by McDarren (Abbot) on Dec 15, 2005 at 01:11 UTC
    Very nice++ :)

    Something that lends itself quite well to Perl.

    Just a couple of minor nits...

    1. If you throw a few sleeps in there, the effect is much nicer (you can almost sing along :D)
    2. There is no 'r' in 1st
    Cheers,
    Darren :)
[reply]
      Ooooh. Yesterday I was told there was no 'o' in 2nd, and today, no 'r' is in 1st. Fixed.

      As far as adding sleeps to sing, I thought about it, but everyone sings at different speeds, and some people like to "drag out the 5 golden rings". So I leave tempo up to the end user. :-)

      I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh
[reply]
Re: 12 Days of Christmas
by petdance (Parson) on Dec 16, 2005 at 16:51 UTC
    Very nice. A couple of notes:
    • unshift into your past days so you don't have to reverse printing them
    • Lingua::EN::Number::Ordinate takes care of that yucky hardcoded list of day names
    Here's my shortened version 
    #!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Lingua::EN::Numbers::Ordinate;

my @past_gifts;
my $day = 0;

for my $todays_gift ( <DATA> ) {
    chomp $todays_gift;
    my $dayword = ordinate(++$day);
    print join( "\n",
        "On the $dayword of Christmas",
        "My true Perl gave to me",
        $todays_gift,
        @past_gifts,
        ("") x 2,
    );
    unshift( @past_gifts, @past_gifts ? $todays_gift : "And $todays_gi
+ft" );
}

__DATA__
a commandline in an @ARGV
2 sca-lars
3 ar-rays
4 nested hash
5 ENCODED STRINGS
6 threads-a-spawning
7 procs-a-forking
8 tests succeeding
9 modules loading
10 objects blessing
11 signals catching
12 saints-a-drinking

    [download]

    xoxo,
    Andy

[reply]
[d/l]
Re: 12 Days of Christmas
by zentara (Cardinal) on Dec 16, 2005 at 17:35 UTC
    Nice improvement petdance! What I'm really thinking about is somehow incorporating it with MIDI::Realtime to make it a karaoke which plays the tune as it prints, with an adjustable tempo setting. :-)
    I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh
[reply]
Re: 12 Days of Christmas
by zentara (Cardinal) on Dec 19, 2005 at 18:58 UTC
    Hi, I put this into a midi (kar) file, and have the scripts to show how it's done. See the UPDATE.
    I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh
[reply]

Back to Perl Poetry