Adding a Feed Class & CLI Interface to my Twitter Bot

After reading the blog post “What I Wish a Ruby Programmer Had Told Me One Year Ago” and reading the code for his ToDo app I realized I should create a Feed class that has CRUD operations so I can list, add, edit, and delete my feeds. It’s probably not the cleanest or most “ruby way” of doing it (if you have any suggestions please let me know) but it got the job done and I’ll refactor it to make it more rubish and/or turn it into a Sinatra app next.

#class that stores feeds
class Feed
  attr_accessor :file

  def initialize(file = 'feeds.txt') # sets file to save feeds to, sets @feed array, and calls the list method 
      @file = file
      @feeds = []
      
  end

  def create # takes a feed from the user and adds it to the file 
      puts "Add feed"
      puts '>>'
      new_feed = gets.chomp
      File.open @file, 'a' do |f|
          f.puts new_feed
      end
      puts "added the feed #{new_feed}"
  end

  def get_feeds #gets the feeds from the file and puts them in the @feeds array so they can be used by the .edit and .delete methods
      File.open(@file).readlines.each do |f|
          @feeds << f.strip
      end
  end

  def write_feeds #writes the @feeds array to the file so .edit and .delete can write the @feeds array they've changed to the file 
      File.open @file, 'w' do |f|
          @feeds.each {|feed| f.puts(feed)}
      end
  end

  def edit(name) #takes a file name from the user and then checks if that exists in the @feeds array. 
      get_feeds  #If it does it gets the id and asks the user what they want to change the name to and then changes that index to the new name.
                 #From here it calls the write_feeds method and writes the new array to the file 
      if @feeds.include?(name)
          index = @feeds.index(name)
          puts "What do you want to change #{name} to?"
          new_feed = gets.chomp
          @feeds[index] = new_feed
          write_feeds
      else
          puts "no such feed"
      end
      list
  end


  def delete(name) #works almost the same as the .edit method but instead of changing the feed name it deletes it
      get_feeds

      if @feeds.include?(name)
          index = @feeds.index(name)
          puts "Are you sure you want to delete #{name}?"
          puts "Enter 'yes' or 'no':"
          answer = gets.chomp.downcase
          if answer == "yes"
              @feeds.delete_if {|feed| feed == name}
              write_feeds
              puts "Feed #{name} has been deleted."
          else
              puts "Ok I won't delete it then."
          end
      else
          puts "Sorry don't have that file."
      end
  end

  def list #if the feeds.txt file is empty it asks for feeds, if not it puts the feeds from the file 
      read_file = File.read @file
      if read_file.empty?
          puts "the file is empty please add some feeds"
          create
      else
          puts "here is the list of feeds from file #{@file}"
          puts read_file
      end
  end


end

After finishing this I decided I wanted to add some sort of command line interface so I could list out, add, edit, and delete the feeds from my terminal. I also added the -tweet command which runs the FeedParser class and begins tweeting out the feeds. I realize there is an options parser library I could use for this but I wanted to design and build my own.

require_relative 'feed'
require_relative 'feed_parser'

class CommandLineInterface #allows user to interact with feed.rb to list, add, edit, and delete 

  def initialize
      @feeds = Feed.new
      take_commands
  end

  def take_commands
      puts "What do you want to do?  To see list of commands enter -commands"
      until false
      response = gets.chomp.downcase
      parse_response(response)
      end
  end

  def parse_response(response)
      if response == "-commands"
          puts "-list     - list your feeds"
          puts "-add      - add a new feed"
          puts "-edit     - edit an existing feed"
          puts "-delete - delete an existing feed"
          puts "-tweet  - tweets out the feeds"
          puts "-quit  - quit this program"

      else
          case response
          when "-list"
              @feeds.list
          when "-add"
              @feeds.add
          when "-edit"
              puts "feed name:"
              name = gets.chomp
              @feeds.edit(name)
          when "-delete"
              puts "feed name:"
              name = gets.chomp
              @feeds.delete(name)
          when "-tweet"
              parser = FeedParser.new(@feeds.get_feeds)
              parser.run
              
          when "-quit"
              exit
          else
              p 'not a valid command'
          end
      end
      take_commands
  end
  

end

cli = CommandLineInterface.new    