snippet Dog and Pony Small CGI program to return a random entry from [http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/|the jargon file]. <p> I started thinking about how I really should read stuff on that place more, so I whipped this together and am using it as my start page. You can currently test it at [http://dogandpony.perlmonk.org/cgi-bin/jargon.pl].</p> <CODE> #!/usr/bin/perl -w # Random jargon file redirect. # # Use it as your start page, or # as yet another funny link on # your home page... # # Stuff to do includes error handling # and possibly local mirroring. # But hey, it's a snippet, not production code... :) use strict; use LWP::Simple; use HTML::TokeParser; use CGI; # Everybodys fav object. my $q = CGI->new; # The chapters to choose from. my @chapters = (0, 'A'..'Z'); # Choose one. my $chosen = $chapters[ rand(@chapters) ]; # Get the index page for choen chapter: my $index_page = get( "http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/-$chosen-.html" ); # Another fav object: my $parser = HTML::TokeParser->new( \$index_page ); # List of pages under chosen chapter: my @href_list; # This is based on the current format of the jargon files # which should be unlikely to change though. while( $parser->get_tag( 'li' ) ) { # Get all links on that particular page. push @href_list, @{$parser->get_tag( 'a' )}[1]->{'href'}; } # And randomly choose one... my $href = $href_list[ rand(@href_list) ]; # ... which we redirect to. print $q->redirect( "http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/$href" ); </CODE>