html

Today I ran into a situation where an old program I wrote is useful once again, but this time in a different context than the original need. At first I needed this utility method to convert extended characters to their ISO Latin equivalents for the HTML world, but today I need it to convert things in the XML world. I can't say I ever anticipated this need, because XML was but a dream back then, but it's good to know that it's still useful.

Find of the day yesterday: probably nothing new to others who are familiar with the spam industry, but while working on a different problem, I noticed yesterday that spammers are embedding HTML comments in the middle of almost every word in some of the spam email I receive! (At some point, why don't these people look in the mirror, and see that they're stooping so low, and doing something so wrong?)

Looking at the raw text of one message I received, sent to my "unix" email account, the raw text looked like this:

Perl continues to rule the world, at least the text-processing world. The latest example is HTML::TokeParser, which lets me easily extract HREF's from documents. With this much-improved document parser and the search engine set up, I hope some form of smartnews/robonews will be available soon.