Technical Ramblings

Every now and then, I’ll try and type a difficult to type word on IRC, and curse the lack of auto-complete built into my IRC client. I’ve always thought “I should really look into fixing that.” Well, tonight I was sleepy and browsing through the entire list of irssi scripts (obtained via `rsync -avz main.irssi.org::irssiweb/scripts/scripts/\*.pl ~/.irssi/scripts/official’`), and I discovered that there is a “wordcompletion” script, which pulls data from a MySQL database.

“Nifty!” I thought, and poked at it a bit more, finding that it simply stored words you used in messages into a MySQL database. So, I got to thinking. Wouldn’t it be nice to take the words from /usr/share/dict and dump them into there?

So I did.

for i in `cat /usr/share/dict/american-english"`; do export v=`echo $i | perl -pe "s/'/\\\\\\\\'/"`; echo $v; echo "INSERT INTO words (word, prio) VALUES ('$v', 1)" |mysql -u irssi -pPASSHERE irssi ; done

And since I did it, I saved you the work: You can fetch the entire database dump (in compact, minimal impact one-insert form) from odds and ends, a new section on crschmidt.net. Additionally, you can grab my new version of the script from there, which changes the script to read all messages rather than just ones which were typed by you. In the process, I became interested enough to work out how to store these fields in a setting – the new version of the script features a number of improvements, such as saving the database password, user, and dsn in a setting, as well as offering help, so people who don’t know Perl enough to even change simple variables can use it.

I’ve contacted the author to let him know about these changes so he can roll them into the official version if he wishes. If I don’t hear back within a week, I’ll submit my version as an update to the original script at irssi.org.

Programs which are easy to script make a great wya to keep yourself occupied late at night, and let you occasionally release something that seems impressive which otherwise wouldn’t. Thanks to the original author of the script (Jesper Lindh) as well as the authors of all irssi scripts for their help in getting this one out the door.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 27th, 2005 at 4:22 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.