What? For a one-off, one-time "I wonder who has the most medals" curiosity script?

> 8 LOC scraper that those without bash knowledge will be unable to parse.

And someone without knowledge of Node.js will be unable to parse the 50-line JavaScript monstrosity.

> And the 8 LOC bash script is not much of a time savings as this post demonstrates; you still have to check each function output manually to find which data to parse / handle edge cases.

It only took that long because he detailed every step as a tutorial. If you have basic literacy of the shell, it's no time at all.

To refute you, I decided to solve it myself, using only the "hint" at the beginning of the article to use ?action=raw to work with the source wikitext (I had not yet read the rest of the article; I had not seen his solution).

It took me literally 2 minutes: (Setting in url='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_medalists_in_j... for readability on HN)

[2016-08-15 17:52] curl -s ${url}
[2016-08-15 17:52] curl -s ${url}|grep flagIOCmedalist
[2016-08-15 17:52] curl -s ${url}|grep -o '{{flagIOCmedalist.*}}'
[2016-08-15 17:53] curl -s ${url}|grep -o '{{flagIOCmedalist.*}}'|cut -d'|' -f2|sed 's/[[\]]//g'
[2016-08-15 17:53] curl -s ${url}|grep -o '{{flagIOCmedalist.*}}'|cut -d'|' -f2
[2016-08-15 17:54] curl -s ${url}|grep -o '{{flagIOCmedalist.*}}'|cut -d'|' -f2|sed 's/\(\[\|\]\)//g'
[2016-08-15 17:54] curl -s ${url}|grep -o '{{flagIOCmedalist.*}}'|cut -d'|' -f2|sed 's/\(\[\|\]\)//g'|sort |uniq -c
[2016-08-15 17:54] curl -s ${url}|grep -o '{{flagIOCmedalist.*}}'|cut -d'|' -f2|sed 's/\(\[\|\]\)//g'|sort |uniq -c|sort -n

You can see the only place I fumbled a bit was with escaping brackets inside of brackets in sed, which is admittedly a little wonky.

Sure, for something that might need to run repeatedly, it probably doesn't handle future edge cases that might arise. But it's not production, it's a one-off exploring the data script. Not every one-off program you write needs to be production quality.

And being worried about "those without bash knowledge"... don't be afraid to use your operating system!

That said, this line of solutions has a big edge case: it relies on the editors of Wikipedia being consistent and formatting each row as one line in the source. If I were to solve this totally on my own, choosing to ignore the "hint", and work with the rendered HTML, and just do most of it with a nokogiri one-liner.

Knowing that there's an ?action=something to get just the page HTML without the navigation and such. I spent about 3 minutes finding the "render" action (documented here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Parameters_to_index.ph... ). Then anther 3-ish minutes poking around the DOM in my browser to get an idea of what I'm working with, and visually inspecting the layout of the article; each cell with a medalist has two links, the first to the medalist, and the second to the country. Then it took me a whopping 5 minutes to hammer out the rest of the one-liner.

(Similarly, url='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_medalists_in_j... for HN readability)

[2016-08-15 18:14] curl -s ${url}
[2016-08-15 18:15] curl -s ${url}|nokogiri -e '$_.css("table.wikitable td a:first-child").each{|a| puts a.text}'
[2016-08-15 18:16] curl -s ${url}|nokogiri -e '$_.css("table.wikitable td a:first-child").each{|a| puts a.text}'|grep -vE '^[0-9]{4} '
[2016-08-15 18:17] curl -s ${url}|nokogiri -e '$_.css("table.wikitable td a:first-child").each{|a| puts a.text.sub!("\n", " ")}'
[2016-08-15 18:18] curl -s ${url}|nokogiri -e '$_.css("table.wikitable td a:first-child").each{|a| puts a.text.sub("\n", " ")}'
[2016-08-15 18:18] curl -s ${url}|nokogiri -e '$_.css("table.wikitable td a:first-child").each{|a| puts a.text}'|grep -vE -e '^[0-9]{4} ' -e '^details$'
[2016-08-15 18:19] curl -s ${url}|nokogiri -e '$_.css("table.wikitable td a:first-child").each{|a| puts a.text}'|grep -vE -e '^[0-9]{4} ' -e '^details$'|sort |uniq -c|sort -n

And most of it was fumbling around with thinking that the year/details links were one link with a newline in them, when they are in fact two separate links.

For a grand total of 11 minutes; generously.

My point is: Don't be afraid to play around with your tools and data! Have fun! Not everything needs to be production quality! And being written primarily in bash doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't production quality!