ASCII-izer for Ace Commenters

Windows users who cut and paste may get some relief

As posted on Ace of Spades, 2014 August 26 at 8:30pm CDST:

Got 500 Errors?

Y'know my ASCII-izer program nobody tried?

I was about to improve it when I found a website (NOT mine) which I recommend using instead.

If you run into a 500 error because you cut&pastried unicode into Ace's totally-kewl retro museum-piece website, this page allows you to de-Unicode text. Call it Moronizer. Works for cobs, too!

(A big tip o' the webworker top to morning birthdays poster Gran ✞ who enlightened me that HTML &-codes DO work on AoSHQ. For some reason, I had thought they did not, else my original program would've been much better. Forehead slap.)

Convert special characters to HTML
http://www.unicodetools.com/unicode/convert-to-html.php


Follow-up message around 9:15:

Mike Hammer>> Mindful - Thanks! Sorry yours didn't work out, though

Oh, it worked. Just needed the translation table upgraded. But it was too large a program for what it did, it only worked for Windows & emulators presumably, and one had to manually install it. And I would have to maintain it. And the webpage it rode in on. And get sued when some leftard decides my program brought down their network.

So, I'm delighted someone has a webpage which anyone can easily access!


And delighted I am. Below, the earlier version of this page, and the program, for whomever, for reasons incomprehensible, may still be interested, and because since nothing is ever really deleted from the web, I might as well archive the original here.


With this program, Windows users, and Windows-emulator users maybe, who cut and paste and cannot then post sometimes on Ace of Spades may get some relief from submission errors occurring since the server crash of Spring of 2014 (still broken as of August).

This program is a quick and dirty hack. No guarantees. Use at your own risk. In decades of programming, this is the first program I've released to the public. I hope I don't regret it.

What it does: Converts all those pesky quotation marks, apostrophes, long hyphens, ellipses, and other "advanced computer age" characters you're trying to cut'n'paste but which are unacceptable to the commenting software on the Ace of Spades blog.

How it works: Copy some text to the clipboard. Click on the ASCII-izer program. The text in the clipboard has been corrected.

There are two alternate forms, Editor and Mini. You can toggle back and forth from one to the other. Editor is like a regular program. Mini does not show up on the taskbar.

EditorThe Editor form allows you to (1) read text, with the problems all fixed, from the clipboard into a text box, (2) edit the text in the text box if you want to, then (3) write the results back to the clipboard. If you just click on the "quick fix" icon on this form, it will read, fix, and write back to the clipboard in one step.

MiniThe Mini form does not have the editing textbox, or the read and write buttons, just the quick-fix icon.

I can think of half-a-dozen ways to make this program better already, but what do you want for a one-day hack? I'm amazed I got this far myself. So, suggestions for improvements, and reports about problems are welcomed - put them in the comments below - but be aware "support" may be limited. Took me months just to get around to this. An updated version will be along in (as you might have guessed) #twoweeks.

TWO FILES REQUIRED, A THIRD CREATED. All three should be in the same file folder. If you don't know how to create a file folder or copy files to that folder, I'll create a proper installation package in #twoweeks.

The main file is ascii-izer-v001.exe.

Transformations of some characters are based on the required table in high-ascii.csv, which is really a .tsv file but who cares? You can modify this table if you want to, but don't hold me responsible if you muck it up where it doesn't work.

A third file is created during or after the initial run of the program. ascii-izer.ini. This file is supposed to remember whether you had the Editor or Mini form up last, and previous Form positions on the screen. Windows would rather we used the Registry, but I'm an ini curmudgon. Can be deleted without hampering the program.

You can get ascii-izer.exe and high-ascii.csv as a single RAR file ascii-izer-v001.rar.

Successfully tested only on: Windows XP SP3 and Vista something.
Version 1.0 released 2014 Aug 3.

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