Tue, 27 Mar 2007
Simulating Typing in Perl
You'd think it would be easy - have a program type a previously written
program at a human speed (minus the typos). Vim has record and reply
functionality but it's done with typical vim efficiency: yes, instantly.
At EuroOSCON a couple of years ago Damian Conway handed out a
presentation tidbit, he uses the hand_print function from IO::Prompt to make
himself look like a master typist. Well, he could just have been saying
that to make us feel better, maybe he can type that fast... Anyway, I tried
a simple example using the module:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use IO::Prompt qw/hand_print/;
hand_print("I am not really typing this...");
It works but the typing speed is so uniform it makes it obvious over past a handful of lines. So I wrote my own that adds a little randomness to the typing speed, it's not pretty, it does what I want and its output is "Out on the big bad web."
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Time::HiRes qw(usleep);
$|++;
my $input;
{
local $/ = undef;
$input = <ARGV>;
}
$input =~ s/(.)/sleep_and_show($1)/esg;
sub sleep_and_show {
print $_[0];
usleep int rand(200_000);
}
It's a little more jittery, which is more like my typing, and has the
nice side effect of a pretty looking invocation - ./seditor
file_to_type - which could be a valid command.
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Posted: 2007/03/27 19:11 | /perl | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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