Enough about books for a while. Let’s do some coding finger exercise. When I migrated from my Windows XP machine to my MacBook I made a backup of my old ICQ chats. Because I wanted to read what my wife and I chatted about ten years ago I tried to convert the old logs into HTML.
Table of Contents
First challenge: Files are not correctly sorted in directory
These files are stored as one XML file per month and conversation.
The naming convention is a bit odd, it reads conversation_1207, which means December 2007.
So let’s rename the files that they will be in correct order.
Second challenge: build a temporary file which contains the whole conversation
Third challenge: convert to HTML
- Replace unnecessary tags
- Replace tags with div tags
- Convert UTC time stamp to readable time stamp
- Wrap the output with HTML basic page
Fourth challenge: write a CSS file to make it look like a ICQ conversation
tbc
