Gossamer Forum: General: Perl Programming: text to html conversion

Sep 19, 2002, 9:33 PM

avdic

New User (2 posts)

Sep 19, 2002, 9:33 PM

Post #1 of 6

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text to html conversion

After open an text file, i need to use perl to do the following thing:

Recognize a normal HTTP URL and turn it into a link to itself,

e.g. http://www.yahoo.com/

?lt;/SPAN> <a href=“http://www.yahoo.com/?amp;gt;http://www.yahoo.com/</a>

Assume that the HTTP URL has form http://hostname/path where the path part

is optional. The path part of a URL can consists of a variety of characters:

[-a-zA-Z0-9_:@&?=+,.!/~*%$]. The hostname contains words that are

separated by dots. The dots are strict separators which means that there

must be something in between for them to separate, e.g. yahoo..com is not a

valid hostname. The possible alternatives for the last part of the host name

are: com|edu|gov|mil|net|org|biz|info|name or any 2 letters in small case (a-z).

Can anyone help me? Thx

Sep 19, 2002, 10:03 PM

Aki

Staff / Moderator (429 posts)

Sep 19, 2002, 10:03 PM

Post #2 of 6

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Re: [avdic] text to html conversion In reply to

you could try something like this. it doesn't do everything you need but if you pick up a book on perl programming this will give you a good start on how to customize it to what you want.

Code:

# first get the data from the file 
my $buf; 
open FH, "</path/to/file.txt"; 
{ 
  local $/ = undef; 
  $buf = <FH>; 
} 
close FH; 

# next, parse the data and put <a hrefs.. around the possible URLs. 
$buf =~ s,( 
                   http://\w+\.(\w+\.)*\w+ # first the domain name 
                  [^\s]*                    # then the rest of it 
                ),<a href="$1">$1</a>,gix; 

print $buf; # output the text with <a href=""" setup

Last edited by:

Aki: Sep 20, 2002, 11:30 AM

Sep 24, 2002, 9:41 PM

socrates

Enthusiast (832 posts)

Sep 24, 2002, 9:41 PM

Post #3 of 6

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Re: [Aki] text to html conversion In reply to

Ok, using the above method how to print the "paragraphs, tabs and other formatting" in the html version so the text file read will be printed in html but instead of a one large paragraph, it will format accordingly.

Right now I am using <pre></pre> tags in printing but one big problem is that sometimes the long text lines extend way too much on the screen.

Any suggestions?

thanks

Last edited by:

socrates: Sep 24, 2002, 9:44 PM

Sep 25, 2002, 11:00 AM

Aki

Staff / Moderator (429 posts)

Sep 25, 2002, 11:00 AM

Post #4 of 6

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Re: [socrates] text to html conversion In reply to

Could try doing a quick regex on the buf before it prints. something like this:

Code:
$buf =~ s,\n,<br>,g;

Sep 25, 2002, 7:23 PM

socrates

Enthusiast (832 posts)

Sep 25, 2002, 7:23 PM

Post #5 of 6

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Re: [Aki] text to html conversion In reply to

Thanks, that works great. I thought it would be much complicated. Solved a nasty issue.

Sep 26, 2002, 12:53 AM

JerryP

User (192 posts)

Sep 26, 2002, 12:53 AM

Post #6 of 6

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Re: [socrates] text to html conversion In reply to

There's a program I set up once a while back called txt2html and it's still being used that was pretty decent in converting text pages into html, it handles all sort of things from linking url's on certain keyword appearance, bulleted lists, etc.

http://www.aigeek.com/txt2html/