Lorem Ipsum (lipsum) generator, in Perl, using lipsum.com

lipsum.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTTP::Request::Common;
use HTML::Entities;
use Getopt::Long;

# Generate lipsum (courtesy of lipsum.com)
# probably needs neatening up here and there
# comments? who needs comments? perl is easy to understand...

$v_out=0;  # 0=html  1=plaintext

GetOptions(
    "paras=i"  => \$o_paras,
    "words=i"  => \$o_words,
    "bytes=i"  => \$o_bytes,
    "lists=i"  => \$o_lists,
    "html!"    => \$v_out  ,
    "help"     => \$o_help ,
);

sub usage() {
    select(STDERR);
    print "Usage:\n   $0 [OPTIONS]... amount\n\n";
    print "    -p,--paras     Return paragraphs (default)\n";
    print "    -w,--words     Return words\n";
    print "    -b,--bytes     Return bytes\n";
    print "    -l,--lists     Return lists\n";
    print "    -h,--html      Return HTML (default)\n";
    print "    -n,--nohtml    Return plain text\n";
    print "\n";
    
    exit 1;
}

&usage() if $o_help;

if ($o_paras) {
  $what="paras";
  $amt=$o_paras;
} elsif ($o_words) {
  $what="words";
  $amt=$o_words;
} elsif ($o_bytes) {
  $what="bytes";
  $amt=$o_bytes;
} elsif ($o_lists) {
  $what="lists";
  $amt=$o_lists;
} else {
  &usage();
}

$ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$res = $ua->request(POST "http://www.lipsum.com/feed/html",
                [ what => $what, 
                  start => "yes",
                  amount => $amt] );
$rply = $res->content;
decode_entities($rply);

$rply =~ s/.*<div[^>]*id="lipsum"[^>]*>(.*?)<\/div>.*/$1/imsg;
$rply =~ s/\n(.*)/$1/imsg;
if ($v_out==0) {
  $rply =~ s/<p>\n/<p>/imsg;
  $rply =~ s/\n<\/p>/<\/p>/imsg;
} else {
  $rply =~ s/<li>/ - /imsg;
  $rply =~ s/<[^>]+?>//imsg;
  $rply =~ s/\n\n/\n/imsg;
  $rply =~ s/\n\n/\n/imsg;
}
print $rply;