Sarath Lakshman

Posts Tagged ‘script’


Posted on October 28, 2008 - by

define – A lovely utility

I frequently use Google for finding several definitions. It feels always painful to run browser every time to grab some definitions. Being a terminal lover, I always wanted to do it on commandline. I wrote a few lines of python code, and its done.

I love this utility.
Cheers !

#!/usr/bin/env python
import urllib2,re,sys

def usage():
    if sys.argv.__len__() is not 2:
        print "usage: define < word >\n"
    else:

        txt = define(sys.argv[1])
        if txt is not None:
                print '\n\033[31mDefinition of ' + sys.argv[1].upper() + ':\033[0m\n'+ txt+ '\033[0m\n'
        else:
                print "\nNo definition found\n"

def define(str):
    opener = urllib2.build_opener()
    opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'define grabber by t3rm1n4l')]
        try:

        txt=opener.open('http://www.google.com/search?q=define:'+ str)
            txt=txt.read()
            regex = re.compile("<li>[a-zA-Z,. ]*\.\.\.")
            obj = regex.findall(txt)
            return obj[0][4:]
    except:
        pass
usage()

UPDATE: toolz suggested me that it would be nice to print all the definitions avaliable.

So I have updated the script with more options :)

get it here

Google is playing more with User-agent strings. You won’t find same search results for different User-agent strings :) . That’s fun.

$ define keyword -all # for printing all definitions
$ define keyword -4 # For printing 4 definitions
$ define keyword # prints 1 definiton

define utility