AIM chat transcript -> Tabled HTML Converter
This is a little program I wrote up over the course of a few days. It's main purpose is to help organise my extensive collection of AOL-IM role-play transcripts into something more readable and pleasing to the eye.
This little program, written in Visual Basic, reads through an *.htm file written by AIM and converts it to a more aesthetic HTML file with the text organised in tables. The hard part about this is keeping all the relevant formatting intact while getting rid of all the junk AIM throws into the file. It's a work in progress, currently at version 0.5 while I rope some friends into beta testing. You can download the program (bundled with the source code) below.
AIM to tables converter v.0.5 (14kb)
View the source code
Before... and After!
README.txt
AIM-html to Tables File Converter
v. 0.5
by Adam Czech
FEATURES
* Translates AIM transcripts into a clean-coded HTML file
* Converts text into a two-column table format, allowing for
easy reading and editing
* Background colors for text are preserved, instead of ignored
* Text color, font, and formatting is preserved
* Extraneous text like away messages, timestamp comments, and
some html tags
BUGS/ISSUES (incomplete)
* Previous versions of AIM had poor html-code saving that
included many anamolies in their standard. For an example, and
the largest roadblock in the program, whenever a chatter enters
'away' mode - and AIM displayed the "has left" line, which is
formatted in a different style in the code - all subsequent
posts are also written in the same style as that away message.
For the converter, this means all those lines are deleted,
since the away messages are skipped over. Newer chat
transcripts (from 2005 or so) don't have this problem.
* Sometimes colons (:) will be put into the text. This is the
colon that AIM seperates your name from your next with
(AEInvictus: blah blah) and is coded differently sometimes, so
it's not always deleted by the converter.
HISTORY
v.0.5 - first public release
So, could I get some AIM-savvy guinea pigs over here to try this out on some of their saved chats? Not looking for you to give me your conversations; just run the translator over it and read through it to make sure that 1) your text is intact, and 2) all the formatting looks right. Also great feedback would be feature requests, coding advice (if you know that sort of thing), or anything else. Just, any feedback would be great.
Anybuddy?