This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Jeremy Voorhis. Original Post: A compelling alternative to Hpricot Feed Title: JVoorhis Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/jvoorhis Feed Description: JVoorhis is a Rubyist in northeast Ohio. He rambles about Ruby on Rails, development practices, other frameworks such as Django, and on other days he is just full of snark. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Jeremy Voorhis Latest Posts From JVoorhis

After re-reading Nat Pryce’s Scrapheap Challege writeup, I tried to see how easily I could answer a simple question with only lynx, grep and friends. It turns out to be even simpler than I suspected. For example, the following tells me that my average blog post receives 2.2 comments.

# iterate through 17 pages
page=1; until [ $page -eq 17 ] ; do
  lynx -dump "http://www.jvoorhis.com/articles/page/$page" | \
    egrep "([[:digit:]]+|no) comments?" | \
    sed -e "s/\[.*\]//g" -e "s/no/0/g" | \
    awk '{print $1}' >> comments.txt
  page=$(( page + 1 ))
done
avg comments.txt