Flickr's recent introduction of the LOLFeed format was highly amusing. Following Mark Christian's footsteps, I decided to write a Ruby version of the LOLFeed parser. At first it was merely a port, but I then found the state machine to be too cumbersome, so I went all out with regular expressions. Read on for the code.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require "net/http"
require "uri"

class LOLFeed
  attr_reader :url, :title, :items

  def initialize(url)
    @url = url
    process(url)
  end

  def process(url)
    raw = Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse(url))
    raise "Feed does not validate." if not valid? raw
    
    @items = []
    feed_title = /^GIMME UPLOADS FROM (.*)\n\r{0,1}/.match(raw)
    @title = feed_title[1] unless feed_title.nil?
    
    [/^HAI\n\r{0,1}IM IN UR BUCKETS MAKING UP FORMATS\n\r{0,1}/,
     /^GIMME UPLOADS FROM .*\n\r{0,1}/,
     /\n\r{0,1}I IS BORED\n\r{0,1}KTHXBYE\.$/].each { |r| raw.gsub! r, "" }
    
    raw.split("KTHX.").each do |entry|
      entry.strip!; item = {}
      
      title = /^I CAN HAS PHOTO (.*)\n\r{0,1}/.match(entry)
      item["title"] = title[1] unless title.nil?
      entry.gsub!(/^I CAN HAS PHOTO .*\n\r{0,1}/, ""); entry.strip!
      
      url = /^ITZ AT (.*)\n\r{0,1}/.match(entry)
      item["url"] = url[1] unless url.nil?
      entry.gsub!(/^ITZ AT .*\n\r{0,1}/, ""); entry.strip!
      
      @items << item
    end
  end

  def valid?(string)
    not (string =~ /^HAI\n\r{0,1}IM IN UR BUCKETS MAKING UP FORMATS/).nil? and
    not (string =~ /I IS BORED\n\r{0,1}KTHXBYE\.$/).nil?
  end
end

This piece of code is in public domain, so you can use it to take over the world with an army of lolcats. Or something.