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SegmentationFault

A command line interface browser tool built in C to search through StackOverflow's catalogue of answered questions. This was built for an open-ended group project task to develop a program in C.

Features

The command line interface browser offers a number of features to ensure that the experience is vibrant and the browser is accessible to use.

  • Question Overviews
  • Vim Keyboard Navigations
  • Language-Specific Syntax Highlighting
  • Typo Correction
  • Deep Question View with Answers

Demonstration

The project, built in C, will need to be built first before it can be ran.

$ make

To run the program, ask a question:

$ ./sf "My question is ..."

A list of questions will be shown pulled from StackOverflow that will be relevant to your query.

To expand a question, simply press Enter to read the full question and its best answer, alongside other answers.

Help Screen

A menu of available commands is provided when using the tag --help.

$ ./sf --help

How It Works

The program is built around the StackOverflow public API endpoint that is used for its search functionality.

GET api.stackexchange.com/2.2/search/advanced?order=desc&sort=relevance&accepted=True&answers=1&site=stackoverflow&filter=!-*jbN-o8P3E5&q=RESPONSE

This endpoint returns the most relevant questions first that have at least one accepted answer to them, which we query using the terminal RESPONSE given in from the user.

Official documentation for this endpoint can be viewed here.

Defining the Pipeline

Our program will go through a series of steps to process the user's terminal input, query the API and display an overview of all the questions. The program will also display answered questions when a user chooses to expand on a question as an optional step. The full list of stages are:

  1. User Input Processing
  2. API Calling
  3. API Response Handler
  4. Displaying

User Input Processing

The user's question query accepted as the first command line argument, unless the --help flag is given.

$ ./sf "My question is ..."

The input is saved, passed onto the API calling methods.

API Calling

To make an API call, the native CURL library was linked into the project to make a HTTP API call. This did require the archaic approach of setting the headers of the HTTP API call.

Note: Responses from the StackOverflow API need to be dezipped as the response is gzipped to reduce bandwidth.

Making the call, a stringified JSON response is returned back of the questions that are relevant to the URL and request body (only appropriate to POST requests).

API Response Handler

The stringified JSON response is passed to a response handler, specifically the method

json_parse(char* json_as_string)

within the file query/json_parser.c.

Using the cJSON library, the stringified JSON response is converted into C structs to mimic the JSON structure and provide ease to reading the API response for the stages of the pipeline further down the line.

Displaying

Using the parsed response returned from the API, the results can be formatted for our command line interface browser. This is all done in display/.

One thing that should be noted is that the body of a StackOverflow question is returned as a mix of HTML Markdown. We render this using Lynx to uphold the formatting of the question.