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