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Define words and phrases with google.

Terminal - Define words and phrases with google.
define(){ local y="$@";curl -sA"Opera" "http://www.google.com/search?q=define:${y// /+}"|grep -Eo '<li>[^<]+'|sed 's/^<li>//g'|nl|/usr/bin/perl -MHTML::Entities -pe 'decode_entities($_)';}
2010-01-30 13:08:03
User: gthb
Functions: grep sed
7
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Define words and phrases with google.

This version works on Mac (avoids grep -P, adding a sed step instead, and invokes /usr/bin/perl with full path in case you have another one installed).

Still requires that you install perl module HTML::Entities ? here's how: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=640489

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Alternatives

There are 2 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
define(){ local y="$@";curl -sA"Opera" "http://www.google.com/search?q=define:${y// /+}"|grep -Po '(?<=<li>)[^<]+'|nl|perl -MHTML::Entities -pe 'decode_entities($_)' 2>/dev/null;}
2010-01-29 05:01:11
User: eightmillion
Functions: grep perl
Tags: bash perl curl function google nl
16
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Define words and phrases with google.

This function takes a word or a phrase as arguments and then fetches definitions using Google's "define" syntax. The "nl" and perl portion isn't strictly necessary. It just makes the output a bit more readable, but this also works:

define(){ local y="$@";curl -sA"Opera" "http://www.google.com/search?q=define:${y// /+}"|grep -Po '(?<=<li>)[^<]+';}

If your version of grep doesn't have perl compatible regex support, then you can use this version:

define(){ local y="$@";curl -sA"Opera" "http://www.google.com/search?q=define:${y// /+}"|grep -Eo '<li>[^<]+'|sed 's/<li>//g'|nl|perl -MHTML::Entities -pe 'decode_entities($_)' 2>/dev/null;}
Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
wget -q -U busybox -O- "http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF8&q=define%3A$1" | tr '<' '\n' | sed -n 's/^li>\(.*\)/\1\n/p'
2010-02-01 13:01:47
User: hackerb9
Functions: sed tr wget
Tags: sed wget tr google busybox
1
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Define words with google. (busybox version)

This is a minimalistic version of the ubiquitious Google definition screen scraper. This version was designed not only to run fast, but to work using BusyBox. BusyBox is a collection of basic Unix tools that have been compiled into a single binary to save space on tiny installations of Unix. For example, although my phone doesn't have perl or the GNU utilities, it does have BusyBox's stripped down versions of wget, tr, and sed. It turns out that those tools suffice for many tasks.

Known Bugs: This script does not handle HTML entities at all. I don't think there's an easy way to do that within BusyBox, but I'd love to see it if someone could do it. Also, this script can only define a single word, not phrases. (Well, you could if you typed in %20, but that'd be gross.) Lastly, this script does not show the URL where definitions were found. Given the randomness of the Net, that last bit of information is often key.

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

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What others think

I think this version was also commented by eightmillion on his original command comments...

Comment by vlan7 5 weeks and 5 days ago

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