Random nonsense generator

[Anonymous Monk]

Just a little something to waste (a little) cpu time with :) It generates random sentences with nonsense words like:
A trebble pangs lall.

All the words are in a separate file, with shebangs standing for random vowels. The code should be self-explanatory.

#!/usr/bin/perl
#babble
@articles = ("a ", "the ", "");
@punctuation = (".", "!", "?");
open WORDFILE, ".babblewords";            #read words from file
chop(@words = <WORDFILE>);             #and get rid of \n
@vowels = ("a", "e", "i", "o", "u");
$frase = "S V O";   #Subject, Verb and Object

for ($frase) {

    #replace S, O and V with words and add punctuation

s/S/$articles[int(rand($#articles + 1))]$words[int(rand($#words + 1))]
+/g;
s/O/$articles[int(rand($#articles + 1))]$words[int(rand($#words + 1))]
+/g;
s/V/$words[int(rand($#words + 1))]s/g;
$_ .= $punctuation[int(rand $#punctuation + 1)];

    #calculate number of shebangs in text and replace with random vowe
+ls

$number = tr/#/#/;
$a = 0;
eval "s/#/$vowels[int(rand($#vowels + 1))]/;" until $a++ == $number;

}

print STDOUT ucfirst $frase, "\n";

Here's the current .babblewords file: (I'm thinking of implementing a random word generator too)

tr#bble
j#ng
y#t
f#t
f#ng
p#ng
l#ll
sh#ng
b#th
b#the
b#ll
c#rr
gl#pe
gl#t
t#rb
gr#t
gr#l
k#st
wr#t
j#te
h#the

Have fun, and add this into your .login file ;)

[merlyn]

$articles[int(rand($#articles + 1))]

The usual idiom for this is simply:

$articles[rand @articles]

This is where it is useful to know the difference between @articles and $#articles, and that indexing automatically truncates to an integer.

Also, see my column on random phrase generators.

[pg]

What if you modify your program a bit and get something like one of those online dictionaries involved?

You will still get random sentences that make no sense (most of the time), but with words that recognizable. Once a while you may get some good laughter ;-P.

[belg4mit]

You might find lc in combination with travesty enlightening prior art.

[Dragonfly]

You might also find nonsense to be prior art. Fun stuff!

I used it for a few projects and it's very versatile.