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Suppose I have a plain txt file in a text editor such as TextEdit:

title 1
http://a.b/c

title 2
http://d.e/f

...

I'd like to convert all the lines beginning with http:// to HTML code for URL, so that the aforementioned content will become:

title 1
<a href="http://a.b/c">http://a.b/c</a>

title 2
<a href="http://d.e/f">http://d.e/f</a>

...

How can I get this done in Automator or AppleScript? (My current solution is using Gmail, but it involves multi-step copy-paste.)

Thank you very much in advance.

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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

This will let you avoid another editor:

set inFile to "/Users/you/Desktop/Urls.txt"
set outFile to "/Users/you/Desktop/Urls2.txt"

do shell script "sed 's/\\(http[^ ]*\\)/<a href=\"\\1\">\\1<\\/a>/g' " & quoted form of inFile & " >" & quoted form of outFile
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This AppleScript works perfectly! Thank you. – user1870433 Dec 3 '12 at 0:14
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up vote 0 down vote

Just do a regex search and replace in a text editor or Terminal:

sed -E 's|^(http:.*)|<a href="\1">\1</a>|g' file.txt
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Thank you very much for the quick and helpful response! Since the Terminal method only replaced the first URL, I looked for a Mac application that supported regex expression. I got MacVim. There is a "Convert to HTML" menu command in the "Syntax" menu of MacVim that accomplishes the replacement I wanted perfectly. Thank you. – user1870433 Dec 2 '12 at 16:46
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