[HRPM] works but ugly

[Troy E. Webster]

Ok,

I wrote this little script to take care of large blocks of white space and
also to strip off windoze generated carriage-returns/newlines from html
pages.  Trust me, it is usefull to me in certain situations.

Problem is I don't know how a '^M' (or windoze carriage return) is
represented in perl, so I just yank off two characters using chop() and
hope for the best.  Definetly not bullet proof. If anyone knows how I
could better this please let me know. It's my first perl program from
scratch.

thanks
Troy

****************************************************************
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
######################################################
# code.pl 
#
# This is a simple script which will process html files 
# and remove annoying blank lines in an html page's 
# source code which are generated by software packages 
# such as Cold Fusion. Hand-editing these pages is 
# tedious. 
#
# ERROR: If a line contains only a single letter and 
#        a \n (or a line with only two characters)
#        then this script will chop it out. The
#        assumption is that no html file will exhibit 
#        this characteristic.(bad assumption)
#
# NOTE:  This script will work on pages generated by 
#        a UNIX platform-specific application OR a 
#        page which was created in Windows. (there
#        are different "newlines" associated with each)
#
# AUTHOR: Troy Webster May 2000 
######################################################
die "Usage: code.pl [filename]\n" if (@ARGV < 1);

foreach (@ARGV) {
	print "Processing file: $_\n";

	my @lines;
	if(open(FH, "<$_")) 
	{
		@lines = <FH>;    #throw it into an array		 
		close(FH);
		
		if(open(FH,">$_")) 
		{
		    foreach(@lines) 
		    {
		      
			if ($_ eq "\n")
			{
			    print "removing blank line.\n";
			    chop $_;
			}
			
		        elsif (length($_) == 2)  # not the answer,
						 # but it works
			{
			    print "Length is 2\n";
			    
			    chop;
			    chop;
			    					
			}

			print FH $_;
		    }
		    close(FH);
		}
		else 
		{
		    die "File $_ not written.\n"; 
		}
	    }
	else 
	{
	    die "File $_ not opened.\n";
	}
	
    }
exit;
    






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		- improvise, adapt, overcome -

		www.pcs.cnu.edu/~twebster/
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