ASCII Art API: Birdie at EuRuKo Golf

Wooga organized a contest called EuRuKo Golf, where you can win a ticket to EuRuKo 2012.

The goal is to write a tweetable (140 characters or fewer) Ruby program that outputs EuRoKo ASCII art.

One of the most innovative solutions was by Matteo (see pull request here), which uses the artii gem to create ASCII art.

A downside to this solution is the requirement to have the artii gem installed on your system to run it without errors. A workaround is to call a web service that can generate ASCII art from a string.

This solution is now available thanks to the ASCII Art API.

It’s a simple Goliath app that allows you to generate ASCII art from any text.

Try artii.herokuapp.com/make?text=I+love+ASCII+art, and you should see a response similar to:

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 _____   _                            _____  _____ _____ _____              _
|_   _| | |                    /\    / ____|/ ____|_   _|_   _|            | |
  | |   | | _____   _____     /  \  | (___ | |      | |   | |     __ _ _ __| |_
  | |   | |/ _ \ \ / / _ \   / /\ \  \___ \| |      | |   | |    / _` | '__| __|
 _| |_  | | (_) \ V /  __/  / ____ \ ____) | |____ _| |_ _| |_  | (_| | |  | |_
|_____| |_|\___/ \_/ \___| /_/    \_\_____/ \_____|_____|_____|  \__,_|_|   \__|

With this API, you should be able to create a contest solution like this:

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require 'open-uri'
puts open('http://j.mp/IRG0u1').read

You can find the app’s source code at github.com/potomak/artii-api.