Arexx > Converting files > Multiple steps >

[Geordie-Jedi]

Hi there guys.

I was hoping I could pick ya brains and get some help and pointers for an obscure
issue that I'm trying to sort out.


Issue:
Recently I came across an old thread about trying to convert the articles in the Grapevine diskmags,
to plain ASCII. https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=65149

It seemed to be a huge amount of work, as initially people were thinking of using OCR
to capture the files, then convert them to ASCII.

However H0ffman has created an awesome Windows script/CLI app that extracts the articles from
the Grapevine bin files into separate files.

These files can then be loaded into Powerpacker on an Amiga, un-packed, then converted
into plain ASCII.

This is a massive step in the right direction, and I've been converting some of these files
into plain ASCII using the method above.

However I was thinking that there must be an easier way to do this.
Namely: Arexx.


What I'd like to do:

1. Using H0ffmans script, extract the files.

(Then using Arexx)
2. Take a dir of these extracted files
3. Load them into Powerpacker
4. Get Powerpacker to un-pack the files
5. Get Powerpacker to save the files out as ASCII text
(Same name, but with a .txt suffix)

6. (Additional - If possible)
When the files have been converted to text, there is still some latent formatting
left in there - E.G. {, {1, {a, (curly braces with Nos or letters)
These are formatting / control codes to tell Grapevine to show different colours
or blinking text, etc.

6.1. Would there be a way to also strip these out ?

I've experimented with the converted ASCII files in Linux (using the Kate text editor)
and some basic find/replace and starting to look at some Reg-Ex, to try and
improve and speed up the process (for removing the formatting codes).


Questions:

1. How would I go about doing this (using Arexx) ?
2. Has anyone tried anything similar ? / How did you achieve it ?

TIA for any help or advice

[daxb]

What format do have the files after de-packing? Generally I would say it is doable and a nice challenge for a beginner and boring for the advanced. Start it and ask if you get stuck.

[Geordie-Jedi]

@daxb

The files contained on the Grapevine disks were 95+% text files
with some IFF image files in there too.

For now, all I am interested in in the text files.

What I'd like the Arexx script to do is:

1. Load the files into Powerpacker

2. Get Powerpacker to un-pack the files

3. Get Powerpacker to save the files out as ASCII text
(Same name, but with a .txt suffix)

4. (Additional - If possible)
When the files have been converted to text, there is still some latent formatting
left in there - E.G. {, {1, {a, (curly braces with Nos or letters)
These are formatting / control codes to tell Grapevine to show different colours
or blinking text, etc.

[daxb]

As already said it is doable. Powerpacker has an ARexx port which is described in the docs. So 1. to 3. is easy (if you have ARexx knowledge). 4. is no problem but it depends a bit how unique the strings are you want to remove. If so, easy too (if you have ARexx knowledge).