The Linux and Unix Menagerie: The Upside Down Of HTML On Unix and Linux: Backward

Hey there,

If today's title throws you off a little, that's good. I was going for an allegorical representation of the output of today's Perl script in the title of this post. The beauty of it is, even if I don't succeed, I have done my job, since (although this script is supposed to produce upside down and backwards HTML pages) the outcome of any input handed off to today's script may, or may not, have every single line reversed and in top to bottom order. In fact, when it comes to the more complicated issue of handling tags that dictate image, span, table, style and other such extravagant beautification, it may turn out a web page so horribly disfigured that you'll hardly recognize it. ...although, maybe that was the point. I allow my friends to talk me into wasting my time on folly like this far too often. ...probably because I enjoy it ;)

If you recall, or haven't checked it out yet, we put out a much more predictable script to reverse all the text in an HTML page yesterday ...well, most of it anyway. Reversing HTML tags themselves produces empty space for the most part :)

But, here it is: My final "figurative gun to the head" script-for-hire this week. When you see how beautifully the code is rendered and how the subtle nuance of each line seamlessly blends with every other in an intricate weave of logical, if not poetic, symmetry, you'll agree that I must be completely full of @@@@ :) Today's script is pure hack-n-slash. If anything, it might be eligible for priority placement in the circular file ;)

I took a snapshot of the bottom of my blog (I don't want to infringe upon anyone else's copyright but my own ;) from before the script conversion, shown here:

Click below to experience this picture in it's original splendour:

and then this one of the top of the page after running it through the script:

Click below to be taken to another page where a larger version of this indecipherable nonsense resides:

The aim was, of course, to grab everything between the "body" tags in an HTML file, reverse every line - writing from right to left - excluding HTML tags, while printing the lines within the "body" in order from last to first. It's very easy to run on any webpage you download, like so:

host # ./updown.pl webpage.htm
Upside Down File Saved As: updown.webpage.htm.htm

And then you can open that up in your web browser and be amazed. Of course, your mileage may vary. Sites like Google were they do heavy CSS or any page that relies primarily on pictures to represent text won't give you that same sick-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach feeling. In fact, interestingly enough, except for the fact that you lose the pictures, Google comes out of a run through this script looking almost exactly the same!

Hope you enjoy playing around with this as much as my friends enjoyed criticizing my work while they casually ignored their own ;) Just kidding. But, in all seriousness, again, your results will most definitely vary. Take this script with a grain of salt, an ounce of prevention, a pound of cure and a ton of prescription pain-killers ;)

Tomorrow, we'll get back to some meatier subject matter,

Cheers,

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

#!/usr/bin/perl


#
# updown.pl - Completely fudge your web page!
#
# 2008 - Mike Golvach - eggi@comcast.net
#
# Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
#

if  ( $#ARGV != 0 )     {
        print "Usage: $0 yourwebpage.html\n";
        exit(1);
}
$FILE=$ARGV[0];

if ( ! -f $FILE )       {
        print "File $FILE does not exist!  Exiting...\n";
        exit(2);
}

$OUTFILE="updown.${FILE}.htm";
$muck_it_up = 0;
open(FILE, "<$FILE");
@file=<FILE>;
close(FILE);

open(OUTFILE, ">$OUTFILE");
foreach $line (@file)   {
        if ( $line =~ /<BODY[^>]*>/i )  {
                $muck_it_up = 1;
                print OUTFILE "$line";
        }       elsif ( $line =~ /<\/BODY>/i )  {
                $muck_it_up = 0;
                foreach $ud (@upside_down)      {
                        print OUTFILE "$ud\n";
                }
                print OUTFILE "$line";
        }       elsif ( $muck_it_up == 1 )      {
                $tag = $line;
                if ( $tag =~ /</ )      {
                        if ( $tag !~ /<(!|img|br)/ )    {
                                $tag =~ s/<\//<zOiKs/g;
                                if ( $tag !~ /zOiKs/ )  {
                                        $tag =~ s/</<\//g;
                                }
                                $tag =~ s/zOiKs//g;
                                $tag =~ s/(<(h[12345]|span|a |br|p|div|textarea)[^>]*>)/$1<bdo dir="rtl">/ig;
                                $tag =~ s/(<(\/h[12345]|span|a |br|p|div|textarea)>)/<\/bdo>$1/ig;
                        }
                }
                unshift(@upside_down, $tag);
        }       else    {
                $line =~ s/(<(h[12345]|span|a |br|p|div|textarea)[^>]*>)/$1<bdo dir="rtl">/ig;
                $line =~ s/(<(\/h[12345]|span|a |br|p|div|textarea)>)/<\/bdo>$1/ig;
                print OUTFILE $line;
        }
}
close(OUTFILE);
print "\nUpside Down File Saved As: $OUTFILE\n";
exit(0);