Recipe 15.23 Program: graphbox

The graphbox program shown in Example 15-10 generates a bar graph of how many email messages were sent on each day of the week, using the GD::Graph::Bars module (see Recipe 15.18). It extracts the day of the week from the Date: headers and then plots the results.

Example 15-10. graphbox

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# graphbox - graph number of messages by day of week they were sent

use GD::Graph::bars;
use Getopt::Std;
use strict;

my %count;  # running total of messages for each day of the week
my $chart;  # the GD::Graph::bars object
my $plot;   # the GD object containing the actual graph

my @DAYS = qw(Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun);
my $day_re = join("|", @DAYS);
$day_re = qr/$day_re/;

# process options

my %Opt;
getopts('ho:', \%Opt);
if ($Opt{h} or !$Opt{o}) {
  die "Usage:\n\t$0 -o outfile.png < mailbox\n";
}

# extract dates from Date headers (guessing!)

while (<>) {
  if (/^Date: .*($day_re)/) {
    $count{$1}++;
  }
}

# build graph

$chart = GD::Graph::bars->new(480,320);
$chart->set(x_label => "Day",
            y_label => "Messages",
            title   => "Mail Activity");
$plot = $chart->plot([ [ @DAYS ],
                       [ @count{@DAYS} ],
                     ]);

# save it

open(F, "> $Opt{o}")
  or die "Can't open $Opt{o} for writing: $!\n";
print F $plot->png;
close F;