(Unofficial) TripAdvisor bot for Telegram
In the past I used my experiences when visiting restaurants to help find a suitable place to eat. The problem was that it caused me to re-visit the same places as they were reliable. As a result, I knew that I was missing new opportunities to increase my palate.
So, I decided to develop another bot that would use restaurant info to find me new places to visit. NB> Bot utilises TripAdvisor restaurant data for only Swansea (currently)
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Available commands
The following sub-headings detail the available commands at current disposal.
# Return list of restaurants by the cuisine type.
/American
/Thai
# Retrieve 3 random restaurants.
/random 3
# Return restaurant info, price bracket (££-£££) and URL to the TripAdvisor page.
/r Five Guys
# Play restaurant roulette based on given cuisine type.
/roulette Chinese
Custom query
# Custom query
/q rating=5 review=50 limit=7
This command allows the user combine multiple arguments to narrow down the list of restaurants. In this instance, the command will only return restaurants rated 5 out of 5, with a review count of 50 or more and limit results to 7 items.
Command uses regular expression to extract values from each field and will still work when given in a different order, for example /q limit=3 review=14 rating=4.5
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Issues encountered
The primary issue was setting up regex to manage custom expressions, rather than creating a bespoke one for each edge case. In doing so, I also improved my regex skills, which is transferable in all programming languages.
Improvements
- Add user documentation for using the bot: currently not present as the app is still in development.
- Allow users to set their own location as bot can support this feature.
- Custom query to handle cuisine type.
- Improved custom query handling: currently if the user was to exclude an argument, query will not properly work.