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hattai-fortune

Hattai's Fortune: a script to be used by a bot, that gives news.

This script depends on feedparser, which should be installed on your system.

This script depends on python 3.2 or above.

Script's behaviour

When run the script will:

1. Read the given (hardcoded) RSS feed: (at this moment, Google News' feed for in-Portuguese Portugal News)
2. Exclude the articles which contain any word from a given list of "bad words" (the match is case insensitive)
3. Exclude articles which have an empty title
4. Add new articles to the article list
5. Trim the article list up to a given maximum size
6. Pick the "best" article from the article list and:
   1. Store the title in a file called title
   2. Store the URL in a file called link
   3. Store the description in a file called desc
   4. Print out the title to STDOUT
7. Save the current article list for the next run

The way the "best article" is chosen is roughly like this:

• Look for the articles which have been used the least (ideally never)
• Pick the most recent one

We assume the feed delivers the articles ordered by date, so no check is done on the script.