the bblog

escape.sh

I've pasted a lot of IRC logs into a lot of HTML documents, which is always a pain, since angle brackets are obviously a special character in HTML, which means I have to do a search and replace with the equivalent entity codes. I usually did this manually, using whatever graphical text editor was handy.

But that's Not The Hacker Way. I'm editing a text file produced by one program, so another program will accept it. String processing isn't a job fit for a human. This is something that should be done by a third program.

Thus:

#!/bin/sh
#
# escape.sh - Escapes angle brackets in text files
#
# Turns angle brackets into < and > HTML entities.
# With --irc, replaces the first 8 columns (the timestamp) with an 
# opening angle bracket, using an ugly hack.
#
# This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain.

if [[ $* == *--irc* ]]
then
    sed -i 's/>/\>/g' $2
    sed -i 's/^......../\</g' $2
else
    sed -i 's/</\&lt;/g' $1
    sed -i 's/>/\&gt;/g' $1
fi

(Github)

Then I stuck it in my $PATH with sudo cp escape.sh /usr/local/bin/escape This way you can run it from any directory just by doing escape example.txt

(It's not actually very Unixy-- it doesn't play well with pipes, and wildcard expansion in a directory will blow it up.)

Have fun!