[Profit]

Hi there, new to the boards. I apologize if there is an obvious solution to my problem that hasn't occurred to me.

I'm writing a perl script that extracts data from HTML files. I plan to post a few perl questions in another topic.

The HTML files are already in a standard format, but not one conducive to my planned method of extraction.

Omniweb's 'reformat' button does a fine job for my purposes.

Eg. I'd like it to take the following:
<p><b>Area:</b>
<br><i>total:&l t;/i>
652,000 sq km
<br><i>land:&lt ;/i>
652,000 sq km
<br><i>water:&l t;/i>
0 sq km

and turn it into:
<b>Area:</b> <br>
<i>total:</i> 652,000 sq km <br>
<i>land:</i> 652,000 sq km <br>
<i>water:</i> 0 sq km

This way, I can create a big array of strings before and after the desired information and run something along these lines:
if ($line =~ s/$searchy[$itr]//) {
substr($line, -length($choppy[$itr])-2) = "";
print "<$taggy[$itr]>$line<\\$taggy[$itr]>\n";
}

If anyone knows of a CLI (or otherwise for that matter) program that could batch process HTML formatting, I'd be greatly appreciative.

I apologize for being long winded and appreciate your help.

kdavis@uvic.ca

[Juggle5]

Profit,

I don't have omniweb, so I don't know exactly how it reformats html files. However, this sort of task is exactly what perl was made for, so I would make a perl script to reformat your files. (Of course, I probably would try to combine these perl programs so you can simply read unformatted html files..)

Here's a perl script you could use as a starting point. Good luck!

<font face = "courier">#!/usr/bin/perl

# reformats html files -- puts newlines after each &lt;br&gt; and
# before and after each &lt;p&gt;. Usage: "reformat.pl &lt;html files&gt;"

foreach $file (@ARGV)
{
open(IN, $file);
open(OUT,"&gt;$file.reformatted");

foreach $line (&lt;IN&gt
{
chomp($line);
$line =~ s/&lt;p&gt;/\n&lt;p&gt;\n/g;
$line =~ s/&lt;br&gt;/&lt;br&gt;\n/g;

print OUT "$line";
}
print OUT "\n";

#`mv $file.reformatted $file`;
}</font>

--Juggle5