Problem Statement

Summary: Find and print the mentions of a given string in the recent chat logs from a chatroom. Only use your programming language's standard library. Details: The Tcl Chatroom is an online chatroom. Its conversations are logged. It's useful to know if someone has mentioned you or your project in the chatroom recently. You can find this out by searching the chat logs. The logs are publicly available at http://tclers.tk/conferences/tcl/. One log file corresponds to the messages from one day in Germany's current time zone. Each chat log file has the name YYYY-MM-DD.tcl where YYYY is the year, MM is the month and DD the day. The logs store one message per line. The messages themselves are human-readable and their internal structure doesn't matter. Retrieve the chat logs from the last 10 days via HTTP. Find the lines that include a particular substring and print them in the following format: The substring will be given to your program as a command line argument. You need to account for the possible time zone difference between the client running your program and the chat log writer on the server to not miss any mentions. (For example, if you generated the log file URLs naively based on the local date, you could miss mentions if it was already April 5th for the logger but only April 4th for the client.) What this means in practice is that you should either generate the URLs in the time zone Europe/Berlin or, if your language can not do that, add an extra day (today + 1) to the range of dates you check, but then make sure to not print parts of a "not found" page by accident if a log file doesn't exist yet. The code should be contained in a single-file script, with no "project" or "dependency" file (e.g., no requirements.txt for Python). It should only use a given programming language's standard library to accomplish this task and not rely on the user having installed any third-party packages. If your language does not have an HTTP client in the standard library, you can speak raw HTTP 1.0 to the server. If it can't parse command line arguments in a standalone script, read the string to look for from the standard input.

Let's start with the solution:

#! /usr/bin/env ruby
require 'net/http'
require 'time'

def gen_url(i)
  day = Time.now + i*60*60*24
  # Set the time zone in which to format the time, per
  # https://coderwall.com/p/c7l82a/create-a-time-in-a-specific-timezone-in-ruby
  old_tz = ENV['TZ']
  ENV['TZ'] = 'Europe/Berlin'
  url = day.strftime('http://tclers.tk/conferences/tcl/%Y-%m-%d.tcl')
  ENV['TZ'] = old_tz
  url
end

def main
  back = 10
  needle = ARGV[0]
  (-back..0).each do |i|
    url = gen_url(i)
    haystack = Net::HTTP.get(URI(url)).split("\n")
    mentions = haystack.select { |x| x.include? needle }
    if !mentions.empty?
      puts "#{url}\n------\n#{mentions.join("\n")}\n------\n"
    end
  end
end

main