use Perl

• compact that code (Score:1)

  by Blixtor (6719)

  Your code could be compacted quite a bit, if you change the calling syntax slightly and rely on the while () construct - and the surrounding perl magic :)

  Something like the following

  if (@ARGV < 1) {
      die "usage: fog -|FILE1 ...|-s STRING\n"
  }
  
  my $fog_index = new Lingua::EN::Fathom;
  
  if ($ARGV[0] =~ /^-s$/) {
      # string argument
      $fog_index->analyse_block($ARGV[1], 1);
      print $fog_index->report, "\n";
      exit;
  }
  
  local $/; # slurp whole files
  
  • Re:compact that code (Score:1)

    by stramineous (6724)

    Just curious--what was it in the diction/style package that you wanted to improve?
    • Re:compact that code (Score:1)

      by Blixtor (6719) on 2006.03.01 6:36 (#46383)

      Well, there were a couple of points, some of them are probably a matter of personal taste/preferences ...

      • Consistency - I wanted to stick to Mark's command line arguments and allow the string argument. Personally I would have chosen a "clean" 'while ()' type of interface, meaning if I wanted to know the fog index of a string, I would pass it in via the shell with echo "string" | fog. This way the script behaves like a normal unix command line tool in that it can work as a filter for piping or be used to work on (one or more) files given on the command line. The while () was made for exactly that purpose so I try to use it whenever possible for my scripts. That results in the mentioned consistency - and makes the script even shorter ;-).
      • Doing more work than neccesary - where is the benefit of doing

        $ifh = *STDIN;
        @input = <$ifh>;
        $input = join("\n", @input);

        over

        local $/;
        $input = <STDIN>;

        ?
      • Showing the usefulness of $ARGV in connection with the while () loop.
      • Removing unneccesary 'cruft' - why do you need $file_count and $more_files? Why handle the opening, closing, etc. of files given on the command line manually when while () does that automatically for you (including the error messages and more (*))? Why is this handling of files written twice in the code?

      (*) The while () loop has built in error handling, it skips e.g. files (with an error message) that it can't open and continues processing the rest of the files.

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