I’ve been feeling horrible about my lack of posting recently, so this morning I decided to make something to share. It’s an addition to my Lorem Ipsum set of TextExpander tools. I know, again with the Lipsum.
This one takes a title of a movie (or a comma-separated list of titles) and grabs quotes from the movie(s) by scraping IMDB. It compiles them into paragraphs of 5 or fewer quotes and outputs plain filler text using your lines from your favorite flicks.
If more than one movie is listed, the results will be shuffled together, randomizing the paragraph order, with each paragraph containing quotes from one movie.
Paragraphs have periods appended if needed to complete punctuation. Quotes recognized as lyrics (split with “/” on IMDB) will be output as a Markdown block quote with hard line breaks.
Installation
Head to the te-snippets page and set a prefix. The prefix will be what you type before the shortcut, and is used to distinguish the snippet’s trigger from existing abbreviations. It can be left blank.
You can then copy the URL and use TextExpander’s “Add Group from URL” command, or download the group and add it manually.
I’ve made this one part of its own group for various and sundry reasons. Unlike most of the “Random Lipsum” snippets, it has no dependencies and no setup required, so the separation is more about form than function.
Options
In the fill-in fields you can set the movie title(s) to grab, enable the profanity filters (they default to disabled), and set a maximum number of paragraphs and/or maximum character count.
Profanity filters
Because this filler text might not be just for you, there are two levels of automatic profanity filtering. The regular filter will find a select group of the “worst” words, and leave their first and last characters in place, obscuring the rest with random punctuation characters.
The “strict” filter mode will use an expanded dictionary of bad words, and then completely obscure the full word.
Length parameters
Limit the total length of the output using either paragraph or character counts. Character count has the final say, if it’s any number other than blank or zero it will truncate the entire output to that number of characters. Any output at the end that doesn’t have trailing punctuation will be trimmed back to the end of the previous sentence.
Paragraphs can be of drastically different lengths depending on the length of each quote. The snippet will combine four quotes in a paragraph no matter how long each passage may be. Paragraph limiting simply truncates the total number of 4-sentence blocks.
Shuffling can be disabled in the fill-ins, but I don’t know why you’d ever need to do that.
You can set all of the options using fill-ins when you run it. If you want to create default options, just edit the snippet’s fill-in tags and set what you like. Then you can just hit return when it comes up and use the defaults.
You can also create a file called .loremimdb in your home directory, containing a list of movie titles, one title per line. If the fill-in title field is left blank, this file will be consulted. It will currently grab quotes from every movie listed in the file before shuffling and pulling out the desired number of paragraphs, so keep it short (less than five titles).
So, next time you need some filler text, why not source Hollywood? Go get the Movie Lipsum snippet.
