Conversion Matters

I bashed up a quick mad-lib perl class for use in some future scripts. If you don’t know what mad-lib is it’s basically a function that when given an input such as us:we:i:them:she:he will select one. Given a whole block of text with multiple parts to be ‘mad-libbed’ it can crank out many chunks of readable, unique content.

#!/usr/bin/perl
package madlib;
use Moose;

## Fields for madlib objects
has 'phrase' => (isa => 'Str', is => 'rw');
has 'debug' => (isa => 'Bool', is => 'rw', default => '0');

## Function to select a random word from the phrase
sub madlib() {
my $self = shift;
if ($self->debug) { print "Phrase = ".$self->phrase."\n"; }
my @words = split(/:/,$self->phrase);
my $length = @words;
if ($self->debug) { print "Length of \@words = ".$length."\n"; }
my $rand = int(rand($length));

return($words[$rand]);
}

return 1;

=head1 NAME
madlib - A class to perform 'madlib' function.

=head1 SYNOPSIS
use madlib;
my $object = madlib->new();
$object->phrase("some:phrase:to:madlib");
$object->debug(1) # to get some debugging output
print $object->madlib();

=head1 DESCRIPTION
This class provides the ability to 'madlib' a phrase/string to create unique content variations.

=head2 Methods
=over 12
=item C
Returns a new madlib object.
=item C
Returns a random word from the specified phrase.
=back	

=head1 AUTHOR
Adam Taylor - http://www.conversion-matters.co.uk.

=cut

Won’t do much on its own but used within some other systems it could be quite useful. I’m thinking directory submission, social bookmarking etc..

(Yes it displays wonky; apologies…)