April 11, 2008, [MD]
I am currently finishing up my research on community libraries in Indonesia, and one of the interesting aspects is how they name themselves - very few choose to call themselves libraries, with Taman Bacaan (reading garden) being the most common, but far from only appellation. I thus wanted to find some statistics, and decided to examine this list. It has a list of libraries, with names in bold, one line of code, and one line of address.
I copied and pasted the list to NeoOffice, but that lost formatting. I then opened the HTML file directly, which conserved formatting. Search and replace with format works great, but it only seems to allow me to replace with different formatting… I can’t really do something about the text that is formatted so? My idea was either to do a query that would delete all text that was not bold, or to insert for example 000 in front of all lines that were bold (so that I could later sort the lines, and have the bold ones come to the top. This might be possible, but if it is, I don’t know how.
Final solution: Export the document as xhtml (actually I just realized you can do this on the original HTML as well, but this is what I ended up doing), and write a quick Ruby script that spits out only the contents that is bold:
File.read(”test.xhtml”).scan(/<span class=”T8”>(.*?)</) { |hit| puts hit }\ And voila.
(Note, if I was editing the pure HTML text in OpenOffice, I am sure I could construct an OpenOffice regexp that would let me do this. But somehow my mind is much more amenable to the “for each entry that fits this regexp criteria, give me the entry and let me do something with it”, then having to write the entire thing in regexp.)
This is why I am really looking forward to Ruby scripting within KWord. Of course I don’t know how much they’ll expose, and if I would be able to do such a query wihtout converting it to HTML/XHTML first.
Stian
(PS: I am hoping that the next version of WordPress has a better editor, this one has very few inline functions (even PRE is not available in the WYSIWYG), and when I switch between Code and Visual it messes up my posts. Not to mention if I embed Youtube videos.)
Stian Håklev April 11, 2008 Toronto, Canada comments powered by Disqus