How do I get Stack Overflow answers inside a terminal? [closed]

Question

Is there a way to query Stack Overflow directly from the command line and get back the most upvoted answer to the first question that comes up for that query?

I really mislike having to open up my browser whenever I want to brush up on my knowledge of writing RegExes for matching XHTML tags.

Answer 1

Yes, it is possible! Try out Benjamin Gleitzman's excellent tool howdoi.

It works like this:

$ howdoi get stackoverflow answers inside a terminal

and the program will query StackOverflow for keywords "get stackoverflow answers inside a terminal", find the question that best matches these terms and return the code from the best answer to that question.

You can also add the -a option to get the full answer, not just the code. So to get an answer for your example query, you would do:

$ howdoi -a RegEx match XHTML tags 

Installation

If you have Python & pip installed, you can get it from the Cheese shop.

$ pip install howdoi

More help

Enter howdoi -h for complete usage instructions.