Finding Quiz Responses (#200)

Ruby
1

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The three rules of Ruby Q.:

  1. Please do not post any solutions or spoiler discussion for this
    quiz until 48 hours have elapsed from the time this message was
    sent.

  2. Support Ruby Q. by submitting ideas and responses
    as often as you can!
    Visit: http://rubyquiz.strd6.com/suggestions

  3. Enjoy!

Suggestion: A [QUIZ] in the subject of emails about the problem
helps everyone on Ruby T. follow the discussion. Please reply to
the original quiz message, if you can.

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Finding Quiz Responses (#200)

Hola Rubyists,

The new Rubyquiz website is perfect… almost. It has the quizzes, it
has the summaries, but one thing that it is missing are the links to
the mailing list responses.

This week’s quiz is to write a program to gather the responses for
each quiz on the ruby-talk mailing list. The data needed for the
responses
are:

  • The quiz the response is for
  • The name of the person who submitted the response
  • A URL to link to the response

Have Fun!

2

Finding all the responses to this week’s quiz was easy: no responses!

In other news, Luke C. made significant contributions to the Ruby
Quiz site by adding an RSS feed
(http://rubyquiz.strd6.com/quizzes.rss) and adding a prominent link to
the current quiz. Thank you Luke, for making Ruby Q. even better!

3

It’s late, but it’s here… my very first ruby quiz submission:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘hpricot’
require ‘open-uri’
require ‘cgi’

def build_quiz_uri(quiz_num)
query = CGI::escape(“subject:(+#{quiz_num}) +quiz”)
base_url = “Search results for '' - Ruby-Forum”
uri_string = (base_url + query)
URI.parse(uri_string)
end

def get_quiz_response_url(uri_string)
doc = Hpricot(open(uri_string))
quiz_table = doc.at(“table[@class='topics list]”)
quizzes = quiz_table.search(“tr[@class$='new-posts ']”)

highest_replies = 0
link = “”

#find the quiz that has the right subject and has the most replies
quizzes.each do |quiz|
subject = quiz.at(“td[@class=‘subject’]/a”).innerHTML
quiz_subject = “#” + Quiz_num.to_s

if(subject.include?(quiz_subject))
  replies = quiz.at("td[@class='replies']").innerHTML.to_i
  if(replies > highest_replies)
    highest_replies = replies
    link = quiz.at("td[@class='subject']/a")[:href]
  end
end

end

#trim the excess anchor
link.gsub(/#.*$/, “”)
end

def get_responses(url)
doc = Hpricot(open(url))

response_elements = doc.search(“.post”)

responses = []

response_elements.inject([]) do |responses, response|
link = url + response.search(“div[@class='subject]”).at(“a”)[:href]
author =
response.search(“span[@class]=‘name’”).text.split(“(”).first.strip
responses << {:link => link, :author => author}
end

#remove the first quiz (which is from the quizmaster)
responses.delete_at(0)

#if the summary has been posted, we want to remove that too
#it’s difficult to know if we should actually remove the response…
if(responses.length > 0)
if(QuizMaster_Name.include?(responses.last[:author]))
responses.pop
end
end

responses
end

Quiz_num = 100
QuizMaster_Name = [“Di Mo”, “James G.”]

query_uri = build_quiz_uri(Quiz_num)

response_path = get_quiz_response_url(query_uri)

response_url = query_uri.scheme + “://” + query_uri.host + response_path

puts get_responses(response_url).to_yaml