Mostly for the sake of maintaining the deluge

[haggholm]

I think this has already been by most blog-heavy day yet (five posts!—not counting this one); and when I first created this blog, posting was less than a monthly occurrence. Since today has largely been a list of vented frustrations (apart from that PHPUnit post), let me just say that it's nice to rediscover the sense of accomplishment one gets from hacking together low-level bits of code, now and then. HTTP GET may be recalcitrant, but damn it, my client now handles the three content length specifications (unless you do something exotic with your Transfer-Encoding; I submit User-Agent: Crude-RSS 0.1 for a reason…

I can also parse valid and well-formed XML documents (I make no attempts at performing any sophisticated verification: It assumes valid XML and behaviour is undefined in all other cases, though it'll puke with an error message if it's something obvious like mismatched tags), collect the elements in a tree, and…do something with it. All I've done so far is download the Slashdot RSS feed (from http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot), parse it, and spit out an HTML document based thereon (with a <h3> for every <title>, and so on). I'm toying with the idea of adding an SMTP client to email a version somewhere (with all formatting stripped out). I don't feel like setting up a mailserver, though; I should telnet around a bit and see if I can find an SMTP server that contents itself with the very basics…

I should reassure the reader unfamiliar with this stuff that none of it is as difficult as it sounds; it's a few evenings' after-work hobby programming by someone whose C++ is decent but a tad rusty; it's all under 750 lines (in spite of being rusty C++); and parsing a valid and well-formed XML document is a lot easier than it may sound. I don't want to write an HTML parser…

As a postscript, I notice that I committed a sin that would surely have poor Strunk spinning in his grave (in addition, surely is an adverb): Three paragraphs, all ending in ellipses. Each seemed a good idea at the time, and I am much too tired to alter them. To the reader sensitive to style: My apologies, and good night.