Summarizing text with OTS

The Open Text Summarizer (OTS) is an application that removes the fluff from a piece of text to create a succinct summary.

Getting ready

The ots package is not part of most Linux standard distributions, but it can be installed with the following command:

apt-get install libots-devel

How to do it...

The OTS application is easy to use. It reads text from a file or from stdin and generates the summary to stdout.

ots LongFile.txt | less

Or

cat LongFile.txt | ots | less

The OTS application can also be used with curl to summarize information from websites. For example, you can use ots to summarize longwinded blogs:

curl http://BlogSite.org | sed -r 's/<[^>]+>//g' | ots | less

How it works...

The curl command retrieves the page from a blog site and passes the page to sed. The sed command uses a regular expression to replace all the HTML tags, a string that starts with a less-than symbol and ends with a greater-than symbol, with a blank. The stripped text is passed to ots...