Define words with google. (busybox version)

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'
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.
Sample Output
$ def lek
A communal courtship arena which is used by several males to try to attract a female for mating.

0
By: hackerb9
2010-02-01 13:01:47

2 Alternatives + Submit Alt

  • 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


    18
    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;}
    eightmillion · 2010-01-29 05:01:11 17
  • 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


    7
    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($_)';}
    gthb · 2010-01-30 13:08:03 14

What Others Think

If I recall correctly busybox uses the ash shell, which, as far as I know, doesn't support parameter substitutions, but you can still look up phrases with a slight modification to the function: define(){ wget -q -U busybox -O- "http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF8&q=define%3A$(echo "$@"|tr ' ' '+')" | tr '<' '\n' | sed -n 's/^li>\(.*\)/\1\n/p';}
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pugpuppies95 · 34 weeks ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

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