by [Reinhard Max]

This little script sends it's command line arguments as a query to the online dictionary at http://dict.leo.org and writes the parsed result to stdout. It uses [Tcl]'s [http] package and the [htmlparse] and [ncgi] packages from [Tcllib].

----
 package require http
 package require htmlparse 
 package require ncgi
 set table {{English German}}
 set max 0
 proc max {a b} { expr {$a > $b ? $a : $b} }
 proc HTML {tag close options body} {
    switch -- $close$tag {
	TR     {set ::TR ""}
	TD     {set ::TD ""}
	/TR    {if {[llength $::TR]} {lappend ::table $::TR }}
	/TD    {if {[llength $::TD]} {lappend ::TR [join $::TD]}}
	default {append ::TD [string map {  { }} $body]}
    }
 }
 proc main {argv} {
    set url "http://dict.leo.org/?search=[::ncgi::encode $argv]"
    set tok [::http::geturl $url]
    set data [::http::data $tok]
    ::http::cleanup $tok
    foreach line [split $data "\n"] {
	if {[string match "*search results*" $line]} break
    }
    ::htmlparse::parse -cmd HTML $line 
    set max 0
    foreach row $::table {
	foreach c $row {set max [max $max [string length $c]]}
    }
    incr max
    set sep [string repeat = $max]
    set ::table [linsert $::table 1 [list $sep $sep]]
    foreach row $::table {
	foreach {c1 c2} $row break
	puts [format "%-*s %-*s" $max $c1 $max $c2]
    }
    puts ""
 }
 main $argv
----

[Web scraping] | [Using Tcl to write WWW client side applications]