So would anybody be interested in obtaining a mySQL import file containing the complete contents of fortune-mod? If you have need of such a thing, you'll know what to do with it. I whipped this up after finding that the latest fortune-mod package now takes about 7 seconds on a fast machine to produce a cookie. This is totally unacceptable. The reason for this is that some recently added command line switches let you specify the probability that any particular category will be chosen. In order to calculate this number, the program by default loads in all the fortunes from all the category files so it can count them all. 

This collection belongs in a database. Randomly selecting one element from within a collection of elements and then from within a collection of flat files (after counting each entry and then assigning probability weighting to each file) is ludicrous. 

So I looked all over the web for a mySQL table containing the fortune database but couldn't find a single one. Weird. In my travels I found a tool to add fortunes to mySQL but it was pretty badly written. So I started over and did all the dirty work for you. Use these tables as you wish. 

First file is fortune-mod.1.99 in a table named 'fortune' with two elements, 'id' and 'fortune'. 'id' auto-increments.

Second file is the 'offensive' tree in a table named 'fortune2' which is otherwise identical to the first. You can keep them separate, merge them, whatever. 

You can pull out a fortune cookie with the following SQL - just point $table at either fortune or fortune2.  

SELECT `fortune` FROM `$table`ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1

To display on the web, you'll need to escape the HTML entities and translate linefeeds (or it will look like mush). I use something like this... where $cookie is the raw fortune from the SQL query:

str_replace(array("&","<",">",'"',"\n"), 
 array("&amp;","&lt;","&gt;","&quot;","<br />"),
 $cookie);

The third file (fortune-mod.sql.gz) is the complete fortune-mod.1.99 in a single table. This table contains a couple of extra fields. The 'category' field contains the original fortune-mod category name, such as 'quotations' or 'zippy'. There is also an 'offensive' field which is an integer 0 for normal fortunes, 1 for offensive fortunes. Making use of these extra fields is left as an exercise for the reader. One more thing... the third file also has been stripped of all the fortunes containing backspace characters. These might be OK for a text terminal, but they look pretty ugly on the web. 

Enjoy.