"Pseudo Randomly" retrieve data...

When you want to crawl some websites and you want to hide yourself a little, here's a simple trick to change randomly your user-agent string.
There's a very convenient function in erlang called 'uniform' from the module 'random', you can use it by calling 'random:uniform(MaxValue)' where MaxValue is the high limit.

So if you want to generate a random value from 1 to 5 you can simple use, 'random:uniform(5)'...

Now that you know how to generate random values, here's some code that do just what's the title say:

erlang: Unicode support for your filenames...

From R13B you have full unicode support for strings.

I'm involved in some kind of interface between the windows kernel and an erlang vm, and I find this "unicode" module really
helpful.

For your information, internally every file path or file name is encoded as a little endian utf16 string in the windows kernel.
Exchanging information between those two world means that you'll have to convert utf16 into ansi strings.

For example you can create an utf16 binary string using this

unicode:characters_to_binary("your string" latin1, {utf16,little}).

This means that your string is "latin1" and you want a binary utf16 little endian encoded.
Really easy !

Here's some free code that let you easily manipulate file paths and filenames...
I hope this will help someone :p

-module(filename_utils).

-export([extension/1, basename/1, dirname/1]).
-export([normalize/1, utf16toansi/1]).
-export([test/1]).


extension(Bin) ->
        filename:extension( utf16toansi(Bin) ).

basename(Bin) ->
        filename:basename( utf16toansi(Bin) ).

dirname(Bin) ->
        filename:nativename(  filename:dirname( utf16toansi(Bin) ) ).

test(Mode) ->
        Word = "C:\\Program Files\\WINWORD.EXE",
        File = unicode:characters_to_binary(Word, latin1, {utf16,little}),
        ?MODULE:Mode( File ).

utf16toansi(Bin) ->
        unicode:characters_to_list(Bin, {utf16,little}).

normalize(File) when is_list(File) ->
        Path = filename:dirname(File),
        Base = filename:basename(File),
        Ext = filename:extension(File),
        {Base, Path, Ext};

normalize(Bin) when is_binary(Bin) ->
        Path = dirname(Bin),
        Base = basename(Bin),
        Ext = extension(Bin),
        {Base, Path, Ext}.