So yesterday I spent a few hours trying to find a cool domain for the project I am working on in my free time. (By the way, raptorprey.com is open.) After looking at lots of various options, I decided that it would be really cool to get a domain of a latin work with the .US TLD. Too bad I don’t know latin right?

(I can't read this)

(I can't read this)

So I went online and found some cheesy one page latin dictionary that had a few thousand words. I used vim to clean up the data (after saving as plain text) and turn it into a standard format (JSON.) Next I used vim to filter out all the words that didn’t end in us. To do that I used a command something like the following:

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:g!/^".*us"/d

That will find all lines that have words that don’t end in us, and then delete them. Then I wrote a perl script which would do it’s best to read in my serialized data, check if the domain was available, and store whether it was or not. Here’s a permutation of it (I changed it a lot and I left out the domain checking, as that’s technically Against The Rules):

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#!perl
use Modern::Perl; # just for one-off's in my mind
use JSON;
use File::Slurp; # again, just for a one-off

my $file = shift;
my $text = read_file($file);
#format:
#my $final_data = {
#   unchecked => \%new_data,
#   possible  => [],
#   unpossible => [],
#};
my $final_data = from_json($text);

foreach my $domain (keys %{$final_data->{unchecked}}) {
   warn "checking $domain.us";
   # MAGIC HERE
   if ($exists) {
      push @{$final_data->{unpossible}}, "$domain.us";
   } else {
      push @{$final_data->{possible}}, "$domain.us";
   }
   delete $final_data->{unchecked}->{$domain};
   sleep 1 + rand();
}

END {
   my $json = JSON->new->pretty;
   say $json->encode($final_data);
};

I have the end block doing the final output because something was killing the program, even if I put an eval around that part of the code, so what I did was basically output the same format that I input. That way I could just manually edit the data that was causing the issues.

Cool huh?