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dislines separates in several files the -tagged- lines of a text document. This is specially useful for translations.

For example, we have index.txt:

  abcde
  @en This is a test
  @es Esto es una prueba
  fghijk

Once processed, these two files are generated:

index.en.txt:

  abcdef
  This is a test
  fghijk

index.es.txt:

  abcdef
  Esto es una prueba
  fghijk

Furthermore, it works with any number of files, it allows tagging of whole blocks, you can use comments, and more.

Check the specification of the used syntax, or a quick guide.

Uses

It's very useful to translate text documents.

The traditional method (using a different file for each language) is rather laborious, especially when you need to do some change: just to add something to a phrase, you need to locate it in each file, and modify all of them at the same time. With dislines you can have all the translations of that phrase together, in the same file (example, produces 'en' and 'es').

If you wanted to translate web pages, I recommend you not to edit the HTML directly. Instead, you can write the content with an intermediate tag language, like txt2tags, and apply the design via CSS. Example.

It can also serve to do a reduced version of a document, for instance: pi.txt

Download

It's a Perl script, and it's GPL.

Version 1.6: dislines.pl

The source code, colorized, is here. There's also a log of the changes, and I still keep the old versions.

Features

About version 1.6:

• It's cross-platform; it only requires Perl (5.0 or newer). I have tested it the most on Linux.
• Has graphical interface, but can also work in text mode.
• Works well with Unicode.
• Works with any type of file, even binaries, ex. images.png.
• Is efficient (does just a single pass).
• Allows you to use standard input and output, so you can combine it with other programs.
• Option for listing the used tags.
• It can process just the selected tags.
• Option to see statistics of the file (line counts).
• It's easy to use other characters instead of '@' or '.' as a separator (change variable in the source code).

How to use it

You need the Perl interpreter. On Linux and MacOS X it's already installed; but on Windows, I think that you have to install ActivePerl (MSI package). After doing this, executing perl -v at the command line (cmd) should show some information about the version.

Then, double click the program (dislines.pl) and a simple window will appear, where you have to select the file you want to process, and then click the button "PROCESS". For each tag, a file like name.TAG.ext will be created in the same directory.

Other options can be used, check the button Advanced options or perl dislines.pl -h: to list the used tags, add -l, to process just tag1 and tag2, add -t tag1,tag2, and to show some little statistics, add -s.

License

dislines is free software; under license GNU GPL.

Other versions

• https://github.com/giobeatle1794/dislines-php

July 2005 (updated on 01-01-2017).

Daniel Clemente Laboreo. n148257 -a-t--g-m-a-i-l.com