domenica 20 novembre 2016

Movie-like film reader/printer based on Perl 5

Again I found  myself inspired by a blogs.perl.org post that demonstrate how to let a computer print stuff as it was reasoning on what it was printing, that is a movie-like message reader. In other words, a king of char-by-char cay(1) implementation. So, how difficult could it be to do it in Perl 5?
And here it is my solution:


#!/usr/bin/perl

use v5.10;
use Time::HiRes qw( usleep );

open my $fh, $ARGV[0] || die "\nCannot open input file\n$!";
$/ = \1; # set one char at time (input record separator)
$| = 1;  # force autoflush
while ( <$fh> ){
    print;
    usleep( ( /[a-zA-Z]/ ? 1 : ( /[.!?\n]/ ? 10 : 2 )  ) * 75000  );
}

As you can imagine it is pretty simple: it does read an input file one char at a time, placing it into the topic variable ($_) and printing it on the screen (using autoflush, of course). Then I wait for a quite random time depending on the fact the char was a letter or something else. In this way I can simulate someone is really writing down the message, stopping after a dot or  anew line.
I have to use millisecs sleep in order to make it usable at all, since perl func sleep accepts only integers, and printing a message one second at time is a little dummy!

1 commento:

Unknown ha detto...

https://metacpan.org/pod/String::KeyboardDistance can help getting the timings realistic