mentat/testy

Chat Line Parser

Parses a line from a chat and returns any meta-data as a JSON string.

Author

Jesse Lovelace jesse.lovelace@gmail.com

Command Line Usage

parser.py <input string>

The output of the program will be a JSON encoded dictionary conforming to the specification given below.

Library Usage

import parser

>>> p = parser.ChatParser()
>>> p.parse("This is a test (blah) @mentat http://google.com @bart")
'{"mentions": ["mentat", "bart"], "emoticons": ["blah"], "links": [{"url": "http://google.com", "title": "Google"}]}'

Specification

Please write, in Python, code that takes a chat message string and returns a JSON string containing information about its contents. Special content to look for includes:

1. @mentions - A way to mention a user. Always starts with an '@' and ends when hitting a non-word character. (http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64429-how-do-mentions-work-)
2. Emoticons - For this exercise, you only need to consider 'custom' emoticons which are alphanumeric strings, no longer than 15 characters, contained in parenthesis. You can assume that anything matching this format is an emoticon. (https://www.hipchat.com/emoticons)
3. Links - Any URLs contained in the message, along with the page's title.

For example, calling your function with the following inputs should result in the corresponding return values.

Input: "@chris you around?"

Return (string):

{
  "mentions": [
    "chris"
  ]
}

Input: "Good morning! (megusta) (coffee)"

Return (string):

{
  "emoticons": [
    "megusta",
    "coffee"
  ]
}

Input: "Olympics are starting soon; http://www.nbcolympics.com"

Return (string):

{
  "links": [
    {
      "url": "http://www.nbcolympics.com",
      "title": "NBC Olympics | 2014 NBC Olympics in Sochi Russia"
    }
  ]
}

Input: "@bob @john (success) such a cool feature; https://twitter.com/jdorfman/status/430511497475670016"

Return (string):

{
  "mentions": [
    "bob",
    "john"
  ],
  "emoticons": [
    "success"
  ],
  "links": [
    {
      "url": "https://twitter.com/jdorfman/status/430511497475670016",
      "title": "Twitter / jdorfman: nice @littlebigdetail from ..."
    }
  ]
}