Madlibs DSL for generating random text
This is the Madlibs DSL for generating random text. There is also a vim plugin for highlighting .mad
files.
It enables you to generate random, templated text with very little effort or expertise.
It can be used for twitter bots and more productive things.
Exmaples
An exmaple is worth a thousand words (?), so suppose you wanted to generate a mediocre fortune telling bot. You could write the following code:
:define person
0.7 "A close friend will "
0.3 "You will "
:define goodfortune
0.2 person "make rain on the planet Mars"
0.8 "nice things will happen today :)"
:define fortune
0.5 "drink a boatload of milk"
0.5 "get angry for no reason"
:return
0.8 person fortune
0.2 goodfortune
There are two "statements" in madlang, :define
and :return
. :return
is the main string we'll be spitting back, so you're only allowed one of them per file. :define
on the other hand can be used to make as many templates as you want. These templates are combinations of strings (enclosed in quotes) and names of other templates.
Of course, you can't have a circular reference with names - if goodfortune
depends on fortune
while fortune
depends on goodfortune
, you'll end up with either no fortune or an infinite fortune. So instead we just throw an error.
Using the libary
The main function you'll want to use is probably runFile
; it reads a file and generates randomized text:
λ> runFile "test/templates/gambling.mad"
"heads"
Haddock documentation of all available functionality is located here.
Installation
Stack
Download stack
with
curl -sSL http://haskellstack.org | sh
Then run stack install
and you'll get the madlang
executable installed on your path. You can even do stack install madlang
if you'd like.
Use
To use it, just try
$ madlang --input fortune-teller.mad
You can do madlang --help
if you want a couple other options for debugging.
Syntax Highlighting
Syntax highlighting for the DSL is provided in the vim plugin here. You'll have to do :set syntax=madlang
the first time you run it but everything else should work out of the box.: