s/regex/chatgpt/

[phips]

I used to love writing regexs. man perlre is one's friend. However, these days I count myself as a 'retired engineer', and I'm either slow or, being candid, can't be bothered. I keep this super helpful blocklist in an nginx config (thanks to Robb Knight's blog for that), but when it's updated I just want to swap out the list.

I thought for a second about doing a quick macro in Vim, then I thought I could, should, code something quick and dirty and maybe submit to the repo. Then I thought "I wonder if ChatGPT can sort this?"

So I tried:

Hey! Can you take this list and remove "User-agent:\s" then join every entry together with | ?

Here’s the list with “User-agent: “ removed and all entries joined together with |:

AI2Bot|Ai2Bot-Dolma|Amazonbot|Applebot|Applebot-Extended|Bytespider|CCBot|ChatGPT-User|
Claude-Web|ClaudeBot|Diffbot|FacebookBot|FriendlyCrawler|GPTBot|Google-Extended|
GoogleOther|GoogleOther-Image|GoogleOther-Video|ICC-Crawler|ImagesiftBot|Meta-ExternalAgent|
Meta-ExternalFetcher|OAI-SearchBot|PerplexityBot|PetalBot|Scrapy|Timpibot|VelenPublicWebCrawler|
Webzio-Extended|YouBot|anthropic-ai|cohere-ai|facebookexternalhit|img2dataset|omgili|omgilibot

Sorted 😄

There’s a delicious irony in asking chatgpt to sort a blocklist of AI content scrapers for nginx, don’t you think?

[glyn]

Nice. I wonder if it could write a correct shell script to perform the same transformation?

[phips]

I hate myself for doing this, but… 🤣

shudder So dirty, so, so dirty:

And for copy/paste use:

awk '{gsub(/^User-agent: /, ""); s = s $0 "|"} END {sub(/\|$/, "", s); print s}' user_agents.txt