Alieniloquent

Several years ago when I created the current design for this blog, I made a rather unfortunate choice of markup for my code snippets. I decided to enclose them in <div> tags like this:

<div class="code"></div>

I’m really not sure why I did that, although I have a vague recollection that it had to do with my CSS not working otherwise.

There was an unfortunate consequence of that: I had to use  s in order to get indentation right inside the code blocks. Well, let me tell you, that is a pain in the ass. Needless to say, it demotivated me from writing blog articles with code snippets. This is a blog about programming. You can practically hear the long silence that follows.

Well, I’ve been more and more motivated to blog stuff lately. However, I wanted to fix this issue with my markup. It turns out that whatever issues I had run into before are gone. This markup works:

<pre class="code"></pre>

All I needed to do was go through my nearly 140 posts and change tags and remove  s. Yeah, that sounds like fun. Ruby to the rescue! After an aborted attempt to use the AtomPub API (which gave a 302 to a 404), I spent a little bit of time poring over the api documentation. Then I whipped up this little script:

require 'xmlrpc/client'

wp = XMLRPC::Client.new_from_uri('http://example.com/xmlrpc.php')
user = 'yeah'
pass = 'right'
blogid = 42

posts = wp.call("metaWeblog.getRecentPosts", blogid, user, pass)
posts.each do |post|
  newtext = post['description'].gsub(/<div class="code">(.*?)<\/div>/m) do
    "<pre class=\"code\">#{$1.gsub('&nbsp;',' ')}</pre>"
  end
  next if post['description'] == newtext
  post['description'] = newtext
  wp.call("metaWeblog.editPost", post['postid'], user, pass, post)
end

I ran it, held my tongue just right, and voila. Every post that had the old markup now has the new markup. Just like that.