Alexa Skill for D&D 5E Spells

This skill allows you to ask Alexa about D&D 5E spell descriptions by scraping Wikidot articles for the appropriate information.

Motivation

Sometimes when I am brainstorming about encounters or character creation, a spell name comes to mind, but I do not know its specifics. Although my computer or smartphone may not be within reach, Alexa can hear me easily. Thus, I have created an Alexa skill to describe spells to me.

Build status

n/a (Not integrated with Travis CI yet)

Tech/framework used

• Javascript
• Node.js (ASK SDK)
• Axios
• Cheerio

Built with

• Alexa Developer Console

Features

Handles all published and Unearthed Arcana spells in D&D 5E. Also handles a myriad of intents by representing spell names as slots.

Code Example

// Get spell_name value from intent slots
var spell_name = handlerInput.requestEnvelope.request.intent.slots.spell_name.value;
// Split spell name by '-' for wikidot url format
spell_name = spell_name.split(' ').join('-');

// Source for spell blocks
var url = 'http://dnd5e.wikidot.com/spell:';
// Concatenate hypenated spell name to url for query
url = url.concat(spell_name);

// Spell information from web scraping wikidot
var spell_description = [];

// Use await to run code synchronously 
// Use Axios to get HTML DOM 
await axios.get(url).then((response) => {
    // If url status code is OK / Website reached OK
    if(response.status === 200) {
        // Grab data and load it into cheerio parser
        const html = response.data;
        const $ = cheerio.load(html);
        
        // Search each description tag for its text
        // This works since wikidot uses static pages
        $('p').each(function(i, element) {
            spell_description.push($(element).text());
        });
    }
});

Installation and How to use?

This Alexa skill was made for private use and to learn more about app developement. Feel free to reproduce the skill for your own use but please do not publish it.

API Reference

https://cheerio.js.org/

https://www.npmjs.com/package/axios

Credits

Thanks to @Dan O for linking me to a Stack Overflow thread on Promise Callbacks

Thanks to @Dylan Sather for his Medium article on web scraping (https://medium.com/@dylan.sather/scrape-a-site-with-node-and-cheerio-in-5-minutes-4617daee3384)