[Wolves] Character stripper

[bambam at opendildonics.org]

> > Here's a crazy idea I've had. How about, everyone who wants
> > to do web design should learn enough about text replacement
> > to be able to do their job!!! (sparkes is a web designer -
> > did I mention that?). If you're wondering, I think you could
> > learn it in about 10 mins.
>
> Okay, once again I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. However, it's
> wearing thin.

You make it sound as if i care if you give me the bod or
not. I don't.

> Before you jump to any more conclusions,

What - based on only the information you supplied? What the
fuck else am i supposed to conclude upon? If i've gotten the
wrong idea it's because the information you supplied (in
your request for help (if you recall)) was misleading. I
simply took the first and most obvious interpretation of
what you said (which is my job in responding).

> I'll let you know a little more
> about the situation.

Why didn't you include this in the original post? Would we
(I) not have been in a better situation to help if you had -
or maybe you were just being too efficient (lazy) to.

> I work for a mid-sized company, with copy coming in
> from various different people. I'm not a web designer, I'm a web editor.

Sounds like you need all kinds of advanced text editing,
search and replacement tools then.

> So, it's my job to make sure copy is fit to go on the site. I'll never
> persuade every one in the company to produce content that only has
> compliant characters,

I know, I hate that too :-) A friend of mine worked for a
large company writing large multi-threaded secure databases
in C. They *had* to have particular formalism, and every
detail scrutinised. Alas, it's difficult enough to get C
coders to do this, so html writers I can imagine are even
more difficult to round up :-)

> mainly because everyone produces their copy in Word.

Well, heh!

> All I wanted was something that would make me more efficient - the goal of
> computing, surely?

Indeed. And in all seriousness, I suggest you learn to do
simple text replacements and scripts to manipulate text in
general.

> - by automatically replacing non-compliant characters,
> with their compliant equivalents. Now, what's wrong with me asking the
> members of this list if they know of a tool that can help me with that?

Nothing is wrong with that. And my response is: learn to use
simple text replacement and manipulation tools (as this is
part/all of your job) in addition to the use of the
automatic tool demoronize. Say you wanted to rewrite a list
the other way up - a single line in vi, and yet you don't
seem to have the first idea how to do this kind of thing.

You missed out here your comments here and hence the context
of my comments. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader
to look at what you said.

> > See, if you educate yourself, maybe you'll get out of the
> > huge urban ghetto. It's the general attitude. You seem to
> > think: I know it can be done in one line using lots of tools
> > that were invented to do this, but, well.. I can't be arsed.
>
> I'm not sure what you're getting at, really.

Well, then (and with the greatest respect), re-read it. I'm
almost embarassed now with how plain and simple it was - I
can't believe you can't see what I'm getting at.

> How are you making all these
> conclusions based on this small thread?

Well Matthew - *you posted* a request, and I responded to
all the information given in the most appropriate way I saw.
If you don't give all the information, you will get an
irrelevent answer.

> Are you really that angry with the
> world,

I am indeed angry with the world. Mostly the part that won't
take the 10 mins it takes to learn basic text processing
tools especially when it's their job!

> or should I be stretching that benefit of the doubt even thinner

You can if you want. But don't if you don't want to. Again,
I don't care if you do and it's rather inconsequencial
either way...

> and assume your bombastic style is meant as a joke?

Well, I guess it was sort of a joke! Mostly I wanted to
embarrass you into learning the simple tools with which to
answer your original post which was (just to remind
everyone):

>Does anyone know of a decent character stripper? I mean, a
>bit of software or website where you feed in a text file
>and it spits out the same text file but with all the long dashes
>made into normal hyphens and all the curly quote makes into
>straight quotes?

A (frankly) naive question, you got your answer, and you
were rude and patronising - suggesting that I might make
someone re-write a wordprocessor in C++ since I recommended
perl to perform this simple text replacement task for you.

For your information (and to smash another misconception
that someone in your line of work really shouldn't have,
that perl is difficult or not for them):

"Perl is a language for getting your job done..... In a
nutshell, Perl is designed to make the easy jobs easy,
without making the hard jobs impossible." - Larry Wall in
Programming Perl.

> > No, it really is you being lazy. If you were efficient,
> > you'd have looked up how to do it in an online manual
> > instead of trying to annoy me/us with it.

You asked a simple question, you got the obvious answer
(obvious to everyone who answered, that is), then you were
rude and snidey at me for it. Then you post more
information, and change your request entirely and try to
make me look silly for giving the obvious answer to your
original question.

> Man alive, Bambam, get over yourself.

Haha, maybe you should think a little more about what you
say, before you say it? Certainly the amount of (lame and
totally ineffective) self-defence you've tried here has
taken more time than a google search would of in the first
place... or maybe even giving more details with your first
post.

Next time I won't bother adding my 2-penneth in and you can
continue consuming and never improve - perhaps it is you who
needs to get over yourself?

On a more personal note, indeed I may have seemed
"bombastic" - this was in fact a mixture of assertion,
dis-belief that no-one else had posted the obvious answer,
dis-belief that you would sooner post than research
properly, and anger at the bad day I was having :-)

(although the only unfounded bombasism was "fucking hell" at
the end of my first post - which was (as is obvious if you
re-read it) directed at everyone other than yourself)

Lots of kisses

bambam
--
"When all else fails, kill the mother fucker with your bare hands"
	- mahatma bambam