Introduction

I recently posted lists of links to Photoshop and CodeIgniter tutorials. I wrote a PowerShell script that takes a text file with URLs as input and creates the html for my blog post from it.

Example

For example the input URL looks like this:

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/codeigniter-from-scratch-day-8-ajax/

The output looks like this.

<a href="http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/codeigniter-from-scratch-day-8-ajax/">Codeigniter from scratch day 8 ajax</a><br/>

The PowerShell script

The script parses the URL and generates the title of the anchor element with simple string operations.

$URLs = Get-Content -Path "CodeIgniterTutorialUrls.txt"

function Get-HTML($URL)
{ 
    $Result = $URL.Replace('-', ' ');
    $Result = $Result -replace  '/$', ''    
    $Result = $Result.Substring($Result.LastIndexOf('/') + 1)
    $FirstLetter = $Result[0].ToString().ToUpper();
    $Text = $FirstLetter + $Result.Substring(1);
    $HTML = '<a href="{0}">{1}</a><br/>' -f $URL, $Text
    return $HTML   
}

Set-Content -Path "LinkHtml.txt" -Value "Links"

foreach($URL in $URLS)
{
    $HTML = Get-HTML $URL
    Add-Content -Path "LinkHtml.txt" -Value $HTML
    $HTML
}

Download

The script and sample data can be downloaded here: URLToHtml.zip

Ausblick

As always PowerShell is the Swiss Army Knife of Windows Cowboys :-).