TheBench.org strip grabber

[billyjoeray]

Category:

web stuff/misc

Description:

This script can be run on regular intervals to download the latest strips from thebench.org I'm putting this here because its a little big for the front page, but for whoever reads this, I'd like some tips on how to clean up my code and some wisdom on how to easily write code with 'use scrict;' I always seem to be needing to use variables in a global sense.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request::Common;

$numofstrips = NumofStrips();

$home = `echo \$HOME`;chop $home;$rcfile = "$home\/.stripnum";

if (-f $rcfile) {
    $stripnum = `cat ~/.stripnum`;
} else {
    print "~/.stripnum does not exist, creating...\n";
    system 'echo 1 > ~/.stripnum';
    $stripnum = `cat ~/.stripnum`;
}

if (-d "$home\/.strips") {
} else {
    print "directory $home\/.strips does not exist, creating...\n";
    system "mkdir $home\/.strips";
}
print "Should only see this once!\n";
mainblock: {
    $url = "http://thebench.org/index.php3?strip=$stripnum";
    $bot = new LWP::UserAgent;
    $bot->agent('Mozilla');
    $response = $bot->request(GET $url);
    $content = $response->content;

    @content = split(/\n/, $content);

  content: for($i=0;$i<$#content;$i++) {
      $content[$i] =~ /.*Strip \#(.*):<.*/;
      if ($1) { $number = $1; last content; }
  }
    if ($number != $stripnum) { 
        print "$stripnum does not seem to exhist\n";
        $numofstrips = NumofStrips();
        print "$numofstrips seems to be total number of strips\n";
        $numofstrips++;
        if ($stripnum == $numofstrips) {
            open (FILE, ">$rcfile") || die;
            print (FILE "$stripnum") || die;
            close FILE;
            die "Got last file exiting\n";
        }
        else {
            $stripnum++;
        }
        print "lets try to get $stripnum\n";
        goto mainblock;
    }
    undef $filetodl;
  searchforfiletodl: for (split "\n", $content) {
        $filetodl = "$1.jpg" if/.*img\/strips\/(.*).jpg/;
        if ($filetodl){
            #print $filetodl;
            last searchforfiletodl;
        }
    }
    $imgurl = "http://thebench.org/img/strips/$filetodl";
    print "Downloading $imgurl\n";
    $response = $bot->request(GET $imgurl);
    $content = $response->content;


    $file = "$home\/.strips\/$number.jpg";
    print "opening $file\n";
    open (FILE, ">$file") || die;
    print (FILE "$content") || die;
    print "success!\n";
    close FILE;
    $stripnum++;
    print "$stripnum\n";
    open (FILE, ">$rcfile") || die;
    print (FILE $stripnum) || die;
    close FILE;
}

goto mainblock;

sub NumofStrips {
    my $url = "http://thebench.org/archive.php3";
    my $bot = new LWP::UserAgent;
    $bot->agent('Mozilla');
    my $response = $bot->request(GET $url);
    my $content = $response->content;
    @content = split(/\/td/, $content);
    searchfornumofstrips: for($i=0;$i<$#content;$i++){
        $content[$i] =~ /<tr><td valign='top'><p>(.*)<\/p></;
        if($1) { $numofstrips = $1; last searchfornumofstrips; }
    }
    return $numofstrips;
}

print "This isnt supposed to happen!\n"; die;