Let’s bring “cursed” programming to a whole new level.

So I had a tedious workload : I had to extract some numbers from a webpage and do some basic math to get some statistics.

I call it tedious because the workload is too heavy to manually read the numbers and type them in a calculator and get the results, yet too little to worth a dedicated script (there were like 20 entries).

Here is a over-simplified¹ example: if you copy a line from the webpage, it looks like this (note that “something” has a pattern but not necessarily all the same)

<NAME OF THE ENTRY> something <NUMBER 1> something <NUMBER 2> something

say you want to get the name, get the two numbers, calculate the ratio of the numbers and append it to the name.

Path not taken - a script (that I was too lazy to do):

• read each line
• extract the info from line with regex
• do the calculation and repeat.

But I don’t want to write a script that read file line by line, and I don’t want to tweak regex so that it works.

Meet the semi interactive
I opened wtf.py and directly pasted the input into the editor, why do file io when you can paste the input directly into the code?

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<NAME OF THE ENTRY> something <NUMBER 1> something <NUMBER 2> something
<NAME OF THE ENTRY> something <NUMBER 3> something <NUMBER 4> something
<NAME OF THE ENTRY> something <NUMBER 5> something <NUMBER 6> something
...

Yeah, errors, errors. “Hey, wrap it in a string or an array of strings” – you are too naive!

Oh.I forgot to mention I’m using vim. Come on, everyone should use vim. So I proceed to record a macro, to turn one line from

<NAME OF THE ENTRY> something <NUMBER 1> something <NUMBER 2> something

to

name = <NAME OF ENTRY>
a = <NUMBER 1>
b = <NUMBER 2>

Trust me, this is trivial with vim macro. Also with macro, you can put a print under each chunk.

So repeat the macro and the file becomes this:

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name="foo"
a=424242
b=12356612
print(name,a/b)

name="bar"
a=42412122
b=12351209806612
print(name,a/b)

name="boo"
a=4242019242
b=1235600612
print(name,a/b)

# ...

Now, the input data turned into a script that handles it self! With this semi-script I got the data I want in the right format…

# Moral???

Well, fuck.