Converting To Forum vB script?

[James Heard]

I'm wondering if anyone knows of any applications that can take a format like Word or RTF and try to spit it out as a text document suitable for posting onto ENWorld and other places that use similar tags? I don't have THAT much trouble parsing out the various brackets, but sometimes I think I'd save a lot of time with the stuff I work on offline by having an app just do simple stuff like translating the bold and italics tags for me. Soooo, does anyone know if such an animal exists and where I can find it?

 

[Thanee]

You could use Perl, which has powerful substitution functions using regular expressions, to program a script which works on the Word ML structure of the Word document or a saved RTF, but Word ML is rather messy, so it's not that easy to do.

Of course, it would be MUCH easier, if you would just write it offline as a simple text document with the tags already included, instead of highlighting and hitting b or i just write [ b ]bold text[ / b ] or [ i ]italic text[ / i ] {without the spaces obviously} in your text.

Or do you need the texts for both offline and online?

Bye
Thanee

 

[Redrobes]

I second that. Perl is your hairy animal.


http://xkcd.com/c208.html

 

[Morrus]

That sounds like the sort of small application that some entrepeneuring coder should design. I'd use it!

Although, vBulletin does have a WYSIWIG text input box, so it's not any different, really, to typing it into Word.

 

[SteelDraco]

Yeah, this is what Perl is for. I just downloaded a copy of the RTF spec. RTF is pretty close to a markup language anyway, its control stuff is just formatted slightly differently.

I've been looking for a little programming project. I might spend some time on this today, see what I can come up with. There's going to be stuff that isn't possible in vbCode that is possible with RTF documents, though.

Hmmm. More later. Let me check out the specs of both of them and see what I can figure out. Anybody have a thorough spec of vbCode formatting?

 

[Thanee]

http://www.enworld.org/misc.php?do=bbcode

 

[SteelDraco]

http://www.enworld.org/misc.php?do=bbcode

Haha, thanks. I was looking for a more formal spec, something with all the various options, like color choices and such. Google searching isn't finding anything more than Visual Basic code formatting.

 

[Thanee]

Problem is, that much of that code is forum-specific.

Bye
Thanee