xkcd

README

XKCD tool

Exercise 4.12: The popular web comic xkcd has a JSON interface. For example, a request to https://xkcd.com/571/info.0.json produces a detailed description of comic 571, one of many favorites. Download each URL (once!) and build an offline index. Write a tool xkcd that, using this index, prints the URL and transcript of each comic that matches a search term provided on the command line.

TODO

• Compare the file index amount of comics on-disk with the one on-line, and update index when there a new one

JSON

XKCD explanation :

If you want to fetch comics and metadata automatically, you can use the JSON interface. The URLs look like this:

http://xkcd.com/info.0.json (current comic)

or:

http://xkcd.com/614/info.0.json (comic #614)

Those files contain, in a plaintext and easily-parsed format: comic titles, URLs, post dates, transcripts (when available), and other metadata.

Ideas

• The current comic can provide us a max available comic at the moment :
  .e.g. https://xkcd.com/info.0.json :

{ 
   "month":"10",
   "num":2220,
   "link":"",
   "year":"2019",
   "news":"",
   "safe_title":"Imagine Going Back in Time",
   "transcript":"",
   "alt":"I wonder what the trendy adults in 2019 who are too cool for Pokemon will be into. Probably Digimon!",
   "img":"https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/imagine_going_back_in_time.png",
   "title":"Imagine Going Back in Time",
   "day":"25"
}

so..the last one is 2220

Documentation

Overview

Tool main allows to create offline index of XKCD comics strip and allow to query it and print URL by provided term from command-line