My first recursive-decent parser was for this Discord bot that let people chain these ridiculous text transformations with pipes like in Unix, so:

> What {you’re refering|uwu|mock} to as {Linux|serif}, is in fact, {GNU/Linux|redact} | clap

Became:

> What <clap> uR <clap> rEfEwiNg <clap> to <clap> as <clap> *Linux*, <clap> is <clap> in <clap> fact, <clap> [REDACTED]

(HN strips all the fun Unicode stuff, so <clap> is the emoji, Linux is in bold serif, and redacted is the black bar.)

Terrible, I know, but such is the nature of the best chat bots. We used to do a lot of CTFs so I always wanted to be able to connect it to CyberChef and be able to use those functions. Nowadays an LLM could do most of it and more, I suppose.

https://github.com/rendello/pipe_bot