A One-Liner Bionic Reader

Bionic reading boosts reading speed by bolding key parts of words. Your brain fills in the rest, potentially accelerating comprehension. Let’s craft this in Perl:

perl -040pE'$l=($l=y///c)>2?int$l*.4:1;s~.{$l}~\033[1m$&\033[0m~' INPUT_FILE.txt

Example Output:

The sun was shining brightly as Alice walked down the path. She could hear the birds singing and felt the warm breeze on her face. In the distance, she saw a small house with a red roof. The garden was full of colorful flowers, and there was a little puppy playing near the fence. Alice waved her hand and smiled, feeling happy and content in the moment.

Overview

This 58-character spell transforms text bionicly. Here’s how:

perl -040pE

⬆ Run Perl, space-separated words, line-by-line processing.

$l=($l=y///c)>2?int$l*.4:1

⬆ Count word length, set $l to 40% if >2 characters, else set to 1.

s~.{$l}~\033[1m$&\033[0m~

⬆ Bold first $l characters with ANSI codes.

Key tricks:

Ternary operator for concise logic
y///c for efficient character counting. the /// part means “match any character” (because the search list is empty), and the c flag tells Perl to return the count of matches instead of performing a transliteration.
s~~~ for in-place text modification
ANSI escape codes for bolding

This one-liner showcases Perl’s text-processing prowess, packing complex logic into a tiny package. It’s a testament to Perl’s expressive power and a reminder of how much we can achieve with a single line of code.