As everyone is well aware, lunch is the most important part of the work day. However it’s often hard to find inspiration when deciding on a delectable dining destination. The ideal solution is to have someone propose options, and everyone reject them until consensus is reached. However nobody enjoys that. Computers can propose options, but that’s less social.
pmxbot has an existing !lunch command that’s supposed to help. Unfortunately you have to fill out the dining list yourself, and frankly, that’s a pain. The result is lots of old, bad definitions in a few limited areas. It does let you sneak in some comedy options (What to have in Canton? PB&J? Leftovers?), but for the main purpose it kinda sucks.
The solution is to use someone else’s database. I cooked one up yesterday pretty quickly using Yahoo Local’s API and the pYsearch convenience module. The result is quite easy, really. The only wrinkle is you need that module (someone could rewrite it to use just urllib and simplejson, if they cared) and a Yahoo API key.
The code is below, also available at http://libpa.st/2K0kh.
@command("lunch", doc="Find a random neary restaurant for lunch using Yahoo Local. Defaults to 1 mile radius, but append Xmi to the end to change the radius.") def lunch(client, event, channel, nick, rest): from yahoo.search.local import LocalSearch location = rest.strip() if location.endswith('mi'): radius, location = ''.join(reversed(location)).split(' ', 1) location = ''.join(reversed(location)) radius = ''.join(reversed(radius)) radius = float(radius.replace('mi', '')) else: radius = 1 srch = LocalSearch(app_id=yahooid, category=96926236, results=20, query="lunch", location=location, radius=radius) res = srch.parse_results() max = res.totalResultsAvailable if res.totalResultsAvailable < 250 else 250 num = random.randint(1, max) - 1 if num < 19: choice = res.results[num] else: srch = LocalSearch(app_id=yahooid, category=96926236, results=20, query="lunch", location=location, start=num) res = srch.parse_results() choice = res.results[] return '%s @ %s - %s' % (choice['Title'], choice['Address'], choice['Url']) |