#regexes

So, I write all my posts in one big Word doc (per webcomic), as I've mentioned before. And to get them into Tumblr, I copy the post into a new document and save as "Web Page, Filtered", which converts it to HTML (with relatively little of the mostly unnecessary stuff that Word sticks in its generated HTML), so I can then paste it into the Tumblr post thingy.

But there's an intermediate step, which is where the regexes come in: I open up the HTML in Notepad++ and apply a bunch of find/replaces to it with a macro. This lets me create my own sort of code to add formatting and stuff to my posts.

So if I want to include an image in my post, for example, I can just save it to a particular Dropbox folder, then put [img]filename[/img] in my Word doc, and that'll be automatically converted to an <img> tag that refers to the right image. :D (I used a lot of square brackets in the syntax, like BBcode, since I'm used to that from posting on the MSPA forums.)

Take, for instance, this cool gif I did earlier. I type [img]ava_entering_spaceship.gif[/img], and a couple find/replaces turn that into <img alt="ava_entering_spaceship" src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40585720/Liveblog/Avas_Demon/Images/ava_entering_spaceship.gif">. One of those regexes is where that emoticon thing came from: (\.[^]/.]+)\[/img\], which looks for a period, followed by one or more of anything that isn't ], /, or ., followed by [/img]. (I'm not sure why I've got ] instead of [; it might just be a mistake, but I guess it doesn't really matter.) This regex also saves the first part so it can be referred to in the replacement, which is simply \1">, or the saved bit followed by ">.

In this case, it finds .gif[/img] and converts it to .gif">. But wait, you might say, why not just turn [/img] into "> and avoid a lot of fuss? Well, I reply smugly, the answer is that most of the time when I want to add an image, it's a png, so I actually turn [/img] into .png">. So I can just say, for example, [img]shy_drawer[/img] to refer to this screenshot, rather than [img]shy_drawer.png[/img]. But of course, I don't want to end up with ava_entering_spaceship.gif.png, so I have to detect the cases where I specify the file extension explicitly.