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Read xkcd titles from the command line

Monday, May 11th, 2009

Does your mobile browser have difficulty reading the ‘title’ attribute on xkcd strips? Is this a problem for you? Does your mobile device have command-line access to a unix-like system? If so, you may find the following title-extracting script useful. Call without arguments for the latest strip, or supply the strip number as an argument:

#!/bin/bash

if [ $1 ]; then
    URLPATH=$1/
fi

curl -s http://www.xkcd.com/$URLPATH |grep "img.*title" \
|sed 's/.* title="\([^"]*\).*/\1/'

Posted in computers, linux | 1 Comment »