umnlookup

Command-line program to look up people from the UMN student directory.

Installation

Install Haskell and Cabal. Then clone this repo and run the following commands from the repo directory:

cabal install --only-dependencies
cabal configure
cabal install

This will install a command umnlookup that you can then go run.

If you're having trouble installing this, go ask Prof. Eric Van Wyk for help. He seems to know his way around Haskell.

Notes on output

If run at the command line, umnlookup produces a human-readable listing of all the people it finds. However, if you need to use it more programmatically, then pipe its output somewhere, like another program or a file. It'll instead emit a CSV-formatted list of people, looking like this:

<NAME>,<EMAIL>,<LIST OF FIELD NAMES>,<LIST OF FIELDS VALUES>
...

The first two fields are name and email address, respectively, while the next two are semicolon separated lists of fields. This is necessary because the amount of field-value pairs can vary based on the person you're looking up.

Literal newlines in field values get escaped as \n, while literal commas and semicolons get escaped as \, and \;.