Twitter Fortune

• bash
• twitter
• lilb

Motivation

Recently, my friend Ben Carriel decided he wanted a random lil b tweet to appear in his emacs start buffer. I liked the idea. I set out to make it happen for my vim start screen.

Fortune

Linux comes with the fortune utility, which serves a similar purpose: when run with no arguments it prints a “random, hopefully interesting, adage”. For example,

$ fortune
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.

Fortune reads these adages from fortune files. I thought it’d be nice to have a script that can generate fortune files from a twitter user’s tweets.

Twitter

I found a nice tool made by Kai Hendry called greptweet¹ that can request up to 3000 tweets, with a nice webapi.

To use it, first fetch the tweets

$ curl -s http://greptweet.com/f/$TWITTER_HANDLE > /dev/null

When that’s done, you can download the tweets like so

$ curl -s http://greptweet.com/u/lilbthebasedgod/tweets.txt | head -1
451980332581928960|Fri Apr 04 07:11:23 +0000 2014|Smile for me, I love you - Lil B

To use the tweets with fortune, we need to format the tweets the way fortune wants:

$ curl -s http://greptweet.com/u/$TWITTER_HANDLE/tweets.txt \
    | cut -f3 -d'|' \
    | grep -v '\<RT\>\|\<http\|@' \
    | awk "1; { print \"\t\t-- @$TWITTER_HANDLE\n%\"; }"

cut -f3 -d'|' to keep field 3 where fields are delimited by ‘|’, grep -v '\<RT\>\|\<http\|@' to filter out the retweets, tweets with links, and tweets with @ mentions, and awk "1; { print \"\t\t-- @$TWITTER_HANDLE\n%\"; }" to format the tweets. I got the awk one-liner here. Basically 1 (true) prints every line by default, then we print who the tweet is by, and % on its own line to delimit the strings for fortune.

Full script available here. There were some stray html entities in the tweets (eg & or < or >), so I threw some sed in the pipeline to clean those up.

One more complication: before fortune can use the file, we need to use strfile to allow for random access of strings in the file.

$ ./twitter-fortune.sh lilbthebasedgod > fortune-file
$ strfile fortune-file
$ fortune fortune-file
Love you and i love life !!!!! Thank you for waking up today - Lil B
                -- @lilbthebasedgod

Then you’ll probably want to add your new fortune file to the rest of them. Use $ fortune -f to see where the rest of your fortune files are.

Vim

I used Marco Hinz’s vim startify for my custom vim start screen.

Once installed, I added the following bit of configuration to use fortune as my custom header

let g:startify_custom_header =
    \ map(split(system('fortune'), '\n'), '"   ". v:val') + ['','']

Final Result