I stumbled across this programmer excuses website and was really amused, so I decided to have a little fun and brush up on my Eggdrop/Tcl skills and create a simple script to have your Eggdrop bot display a random programmer excuse taken from programmerexcuses.com. Simply add this code to your bot's TCL script:

# include the http package

package require http



# bind the procedure to when someone types '!excuse'

bind pub - !excuse pub_excuse



# procedure to display the excuse

proc pub_excuse {nick mask hand channel args} {



    # scrape the website to get its full content

    set token [http::geturl "http://www.programmerexcuses.com"]



    # set the excuse variable which is contained between the only href tag

    regexp {<a href(.+?)>(.+?)</a>} [http::data $token]] -> inner_href excuse



    # cleanup the connection to avoid memory leaks

    http::cleanup $token



    # output to the channel

    putserv "PRIVMSG $channel :$excuse"

}

Usage in the channel / example:

<jayroman> !excuse

<jayrobot> It can't be broken, it passes all unit tests

Before you say anything, yes, the code might a be a little over-commented, but since most developers I run into have limited or no experience with Eggdrop or Tcl, I wanted to be very clear on what every line is doing.