Remembering Sven Guckes - a perl hacker perspective

[cavac]

A couple of months ago, my friend Sven Guckes passed away.

When we met in person, once or twice a year, it was mostly him teaching me new stuff. That's what he always did, with everyone: Showed people new tips and tricks for the command line, helped them out whenever he could without asking anything in return. In February 2021, he asked in Twitter for a way to convert his text-only conference "diary" (a list of events at a conference) to an RSS feed. I whipped up a quick proof of concept. It was not perfect by any means, but he liked it.

He had a format in his text files like this:

* 2021-02-15 08:10:00
Working for Twitter now?

Sven on Twitter asked to whip up a script to turn diaries into RSS fee
+ds.

* 2021-02-15 08:20:00
That was easy!

All done!

This was easier than expected!

And this is what i came up with.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use HTTP::Date;
use Time::Piece;
use Carp;

my $gmtoffset = 1; # Hours

print '<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" 
+xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">', "\n";
print '<channel>', "\n";

my ($date, $title);
my @content;

while((my $line = <>)) {
    chomp $line;
    if($line =~ /^\*\ (\d\d\d\d\-\d\d\-\d\d\ \d\d\:\d\d\:\d\d)/) {
        my $temp = $1;
        if(defined($date)) {
            printItem();
        }
        $date = $temp;;
        $title = <>;
        @content = ();
        chomp $title;
        next;
    }
    next unless defined($date);
    push @content, $line;
}

if(defined($date)) {
    printItem();
}

print '</channel>', "\n";
print '</rss>', "\n";

exit 0;

sub printItem {
    print '<item>', "\n";
    print '<title>', $title, '</title>', "\n";
    print '<pubDate>', toWebdate($date), '</pubDate>', "\n";
    print '<description>', join('<br/>', @content), '</description>', 
+"\n";
    print '</item>', "\n";

    return;
}

sub toWebdate {
    my ($localdate) = @_;

    my $webdate;

    my $unixtime = Time::Piece->strptime($localdate, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%
+S")->epoch();
    $unixtime -= $gmtoffset * 3600;

    $webdate = time2str($unixtime);

    return $webdate;
}

Then you run it with perl diary2rss.pl < testdiary.txt and get:

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:a
+tom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<channel>
<item>
<title>Working for Twitter now?</title>
<pubDate>Mon, 15 Feb 2021 07:10:00 GMT</pubDate>
<description><br/>Sven on Twitter asked to whip up a script to turn di
+aries into RSS feeds.<br/></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>That was easy!</title>
<pubDate>Mon, 15 Feb 2021 07:20:00 GMT</pubDate>
<description><br/>All done!<br/><br/>This was easier than expected!</d
+escription>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

We were planning to get together this year, maybe look into writing a proper tool for him to use. But sadly, this will not happen.

Thank you, Sven, for teaching me so much. I just wish i could have returned the favours.