Channel MOTD Markup Language

[Thomion]

I’m trying to parse a channel MOTD but it seems to be a bit more complex and I could not find any documentation.

Here the example I got via XML API, truncated for this purpose:

    <br>
    <b><i><fontsize=24>
            <color=0xffffffff>
            Awesome MOTD
    </fontsize></b></i>
    <br>
    <u><fontsize=14>
           Some Title</color>
    </u>
    <br>
    <loc>
        <url=http://www.example.org/>
        NEW EXAMPLE WEBSITE
        </url>
        </fontsize>
    </loc>
    <br>
    ....

I tried to indent the example as good as possible, but as it turns out this not XML but rather interleaved XML-ish tags.

Is there any documentation of this markup language? Is it maybe a well-known one?
Or is there even a library that can parse or transform it?

[Blacksmoke16]

It is probably an old markup variation of XML/HTML, best bet would be to probably make your own parser to convert the eve specific parts ie fontsize=14, to a more standard css style then assume the rest is html.

For example:

    <loc>
        <url=http://www.example.org/>
        NEW EXAMPLE WEBSITE
        </url>
        </fontsize>
    </loc>

Parse that into like:

<a href="https://www.example.org" style="fontsize: large;">NEW EXAMPLE WEBSITE </a>

[Thomion]

That was my first approach, but the markup is not XML structure wise and can probably also not be directly parsed into a tree/XML DOM like structure. This makes all XML parsers useless. Some html parsers are forgiving enough to work to some degree.

The best I have so far is to make extensive use of regular expressions

What might work is to lex the raw string and then transform it such that it can be parsed as a tree.

e.g.

Step 1: on out-of-order </b> tag, reorder
<b><fontsize=14><i>Hello</b></fontsize></i>
                          ^
Step 2: on out-of-order </b> tag, reorder
<b><fontsize=14><i>Hello</i></b></fontsize>
                              ^                                                  
Result: What I'd call 'CCP XML-ish'
<b><fontsize=14><i>Hello</i></fontsize></b>

Step3: Now we have proper XML structure, convert to HTML
<b><font size="14"><i>Hello</i></font></b>

But for that I’d need to write a proper lexer and transformator

[Blacksmoke16]

Hmm.