English resources @ BBC

BBC website hosts some useful resources to learn “real world” english:

I spend about 1 hour / 1.5 hours driving each day, so I decided to get all the audio files from BBC and burn a CD

First I extracted all the URIs below http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish using linkchecker, and then I coded a quick and dirty perl script to download the URIs:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Text::CSV_XS;
use Set::Scalar;

my $filename = "/tmp/foobar";
my $domain = "www.bbc.co.uk";

my $url = "";
my $ext = "";

# Media file extensions
my $media = Set::Scalar->new('mp3', 'mp4', 'ram', 'swf');

my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new({binary => 1, sep_char => ','});
open my $io, "< ", $filename or die "$filename: $!";

while (my $row = $csv->getline($io)) {
  my @fields = @$row;

  # URIs are absolute or relative to the server...
  if (substr($fields[0],0,4) eq "http") {
    $url = $fields[0] . "\n" ;
  } else {
    $url = "http://" . $domain . $fields[0] . "\n";
  }

  # If the URI points to a media file, print it
  my $nap = $url;
  if ($nap =~ /.*\.([^\.]*)$/) {
    $ext = substr($1,0,3);

    if ($media->has($ext)) {
      print "$url\n";
    }
  }

}

wget -i and you wget it!

PS: sets are elegant