Re: Storing Experience for Posterity

[morgon]

I would prefer to generate the timestamp in Perl rather than using backticks. One possibilty (among many):

my $date = POSIX::strftime "%Y%m%d", localtime;

And what you totally disregard is error-handling.

Your get could fail (e.g. no internet-connection), your parsing of the page could fail (the website changed it's layout) and your open could fail (some permission problem maybe).

You should handle these conditions and report appropriate errors, rather than fail silently and maybe loose the history of your meteoric raise...

[GotToBTru]

Changes:

• Added error message if web page get fails
• Use strftime instead of backtics and Windows date symbols
• Test to see if all 3 values were found before logging
• Using Tie::File for easy read-write access to file
• Replace latest line with new data if Level has not changed
• Added error message if regex could not find all 3 values
• Replace 2 s/// with 1 tr///
• Add math and reporting of anticipated level up

use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::Simple;
use URI::URL;
use POSIX qw/strftime/;
use Tie::File;
use DateTime;

my $date= strftime "%Y%m%d", localtime; # YYYYMMDD
my ($url, $content, $experience, $level, $posts);

$url = url('http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=844862');

$content = get($url) or die "Get failure";
$content =~ tr/\cJ\cM//d;

($experience, $level, $posts) =
        ($content =~ /Experience:\D+(\d+).+
                      Level:.+([A-Z][a-z]+\s+\(\d+\)).+
                      Writeups:.+>(\d+)</x);

die unless ($experience && $level && $posts);
my ($start, $startdt, $startexp, $today);
tie my @log, 'Tie::File', 'perl_xp.csv';
($start, $startexp) = (split ',', $log[-2])[0,1];
if ($level eq (split ',',$log[-1])[3] || '') {
    pop @log;
} 
push @log, join ',',$date,$experience,$posts,$level;
untie @log;

my ($year,$month,$day) = $start =~ m/(\d{4})(\d\d)(\d\d)/;
$startdt = DateTime->new(year => $year, month=> $month, day => $day);

($year,$month,$day) = $date =~ m/(\d{4})(\d\d)(\d\d)/;
$today = DateTime->new(year => $year, month=> $month, day => $day);
my $timeflies = $startdt->delta_days($today)->{days};
my $exprate = ($experience-$startexp)/$timeflies;
printf "%d days, %d posts, %d points, %.2f points per day\n",$timeflie
+s,$posts,$experience,$exprate;
my $nextlevel = 3000;
my $leveldays = ($nextlevel - $experience)/$exprate;
my $leveldate = $today->add(days => $leveldays);
printf "Level up in %d days, on %s\n", $leveldays, $leveldate->mdy();