[Cialug] Text file munging

[Dave Weis]

Zachary Kotlarek wrote:
> On Jun 18, 2009, at 12:45 PM, Dave Weis wrote:
>> I have a bunch of individual email messages from mail.app that have been
>> disassociated from their mailbox. I have tried copying them into the
>> messages folder but they don't go because of two lines in the plist at 
>> the
>> end. I need to remove
>>         <key>remote-id</key>
>>         <string>4294</string>
>> from 20,000 files. The number varies and the location at the end of the
>> file can move a few lines at a time. I've tried my regex magic on it but
>> don't have enough to get it working. Any help?
> 
> This works (at least on my .emlx files), and doesn't drop other string 
> values you might need from the plist.
> 
> It does not do anything to protect plists in your message bodies though. 
> I couldn't figure out how Apple was delimiting the plist at the end, or 
> escaping plists in the body, and I was too lazy to read backwards from 
> the end to find the last <plist> line.
> 
> Reads STDIN, writes STDOUT
> 
> -- 
> 
> #!/usr/bin/perl -w
> use strict;
> 
> my $skip_next = 0;
> while(<>) {
>     if (/^\s*\<key\>remote\-id\<\/key\>\s*$/i) {
>         $skip_next = 1;
>     } elsif ($skip_next && /^\s*\<string\>\d+\<\/string\>\s*$/i) {
>         $skip_next = 0;
>     } else {
>         print $_;
>     }
> }

This does do what I want, any good idea on how I can make it either edit 
in place or spit it out to a different directory with the same name?

I probably should have provided more context in the first request, 
there's a handful of key/value pairs so I can't remove them all.

I guess I can probably for loop it and get this chunk to work if it's 
not easily doable.

Thanks!!

dave




-- 
Dave Weis
515-224-9229
djweis at internetsolver.com
http://www.internetsolver.com/