Another good one
My girlfriend programs Java, and she got herself in her head to write a program to solve Sudoku grids (and it works!). However, she needed grids...
Well, she found an URL giving different grids each time it was invoked, and gave it to me. I had to take the case with values in them and output for each grid the correct instructions to set the grid. To make matters more complex yet, the grids were 16x16, and numbers 10 to 16 were printed A, B, ..., G. She wanted the numbers.
Complex task? No, a quick look at the generated HTML, and a one liner:
for i in `seq 30`; do htmlcode=orig.$i; gridfile=grid$i.java; wget -O $htmlcode -nv
http://the.url/which/I/dont/remember; echo "// Grid $i" >$gridfile; perl -ne '($x, $y, $val) = /name="sudoku\[(\d+)\]\[(\d+)\]" value="(.)"/ or next; $val =~ /\D/ and $val = 10 + (ord($val) - ord("A")); print "grid.set($x, $y, $val);\n"' <$htmlcode >$gridfile; rm $htmlcode -f;done
OK, this one is a little complex, but I did type it in one line only
The time to build it properly, double check it, generate the thirty grids: 20 minutes, the vast majority of which has been spent downloading the grids...