[MacPerl] New User's MacPerl Questions

[David Rouse <cn1407@coastalnet.com>]

I've been recomended MacPerl by the AppleScript list, after they heard what I
was trying to do with AppleScript -- conversion of text files (lots of them) to
HTML encoding. I looked through this list's archives before signing up, but
there are already a few questions I have.

1) Is there an extension or AppleScript for BBEdit to run/syntax check MacPerl
scripts that I'm editing in BBEdit?

2) My UNIX-centric learning Perl book uses something like system('date') get the
date from the machine. When I do this I always get a -1. I guess my question is
-- where in the documentation does it cover finding the date and assigning it to
a variable?

3) Many of the text files I'll be encoding into HTML will have special Mac
characters like option-8 bullets and long dashes. What is the best way to tackle
this?

4) I'd like to be able to 'watch' a folder (like in AS with an idle timer), is
this a MacPerl question, or should I just buy the next book in that UNIX-centric
Perl series?

What I'm trying to do, by the way, is help my newspaper export stories and
classified ads to the web. Classified ads will already be sorta in HTML, the
news stories will be in XTAGs (Quark's text markup). One of the cool things I'd
like to do is find in-the-news names and insert a link that jumps to a short bio
and picture of the person, place or thing. But first, naturally, I need to get
my head around Perl.

David Rouse



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