What's my name?

Bash, 120 112 106 102 80 76 74 bytes

-8 bytes because wget is smart enough to redirect HTTP to HTTPS when necessary
-6 bytes thanks to another sed suggestion from Cows quack
-26 bytes thanks to Digital Trauma
-4 bytes thanks to Gilles - codegolf.stackexchange.com/u/123 redirects
-2 bytes thanks to Digital Trauma's answer's wget flags

wget -qO- codegolf.stackexchange.com/u/$1|sed -nr 's/.*>User (.*) -.*/\1/p'

No TIO link since the TIO arenas can't access the internet.

Thanks to the answers here and the people in chat for helping me with this. I used an approach similar to HyperNeutrino's.

  1. wget -qO- codegolf.stackexchange.com/users/$1 downloads the user's profile page and prints the file to STDOUT. -q does it quietly (no speed information).

  2. sed -nr 's/.*User (.*) -.*/\1/p' searches for the first string User<space>, then prints up until it reaches the end of the name, found using sed magic.

Previous answer that I wrote more independently (102 bytes):

wget codegolf.stackexchange.com/users/$1 2>y
sed '6!d' <$1|cut -c 13-|cut -d '&' -f1|sed 's/.\{23\}$//'

  1. wget codegolf.stackexchange.com/users/$1 2>y saves the user profile HTML to a file titled with their UserID and dumps STDERR to y.

  2. cat $1 pipes the file into the parts that cut away the useless HTML.

  3. sed '6!d' (in the place of head -6 | tail -1) gets the sixth line by itself.

  4. cut -c 13- strips away the first 13 characters, getting the username to start at the first character of the string.

  5. cut -d '&' -f1 cuts everything after the &. This relies on the fact that an ampersand is not allowed to be in a username, nor an HTML title.
    Now the string is <username> - Programming Puzzles

  6. sed 's/.\{23\}$//' was a suggestion from cows quack to remove the last 15 bytes of a file. This gets the username by itself.

Here's a full bash script.


Bash + GNU utilities, 66

  • 3 bytes saved thanks to @Arnauld.
  • 4 bytes saved thanks to @Gilles.
wget -qO- codegolf.stackexchange.com/u/$1|grep -Po '"User \K[^"]+'

Uses -PCRE regex flavour to do a \K match start reset for much shorter output filtering.

If your system already has curl installed, we can use @Gilles' suggestion:

Bash + curl + GNU utilities, 64

curl -L codegolf.stackexchange.com/u/$1|grep -Po '"User \K[^"]+'

Python 2 + requests, 112 bytes

from requests import*
t=get('http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/users/'+input()).text
print t[49:t.index('&')-23]

note

once SE goes fully https, the http needs to be changed to https, which will make this 113 bytes.

The beginning of a user profile looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>

<head>

<title>User MD XF - Programming Puzzles &amp; Code Golf Stack Exchange</title>

The username starts at index 49 and the ampersand occurs 23 characters to the right of where it ends (- Programming Puzzles)

-3 bytes thanks to StepHen/Mego by removing the unused re import
-1 byte thanks to Uriel

Tags:

Code Golf

Internet

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