No Mod Required

Twice this morning I did massive, repetitive, string manipulations with JavaScript.

One took a list of files, turned it into an array and then looped through creating .htaccess entries.

The other took an HTML table output by Excel and turned it into a Definition List. I then used FireBug to copy the innerHTML of the body and pasted it into a new document, ready to be manipulated in the application I’m building (with JavaScript of course ) If you’re curious, here’s the code for that one:

<script type="text/javascript">
window.onload = function() {
    var trs = document.getElementsByTagName("TR");
    var newString ="<dl>";

    for (i=0;i<trs.length;i++){
        var tds=trs[i].getElementsByTagName("TD");
        newString +="<dt id='"+tds[1].innerHTML+"'>"+tds[4].innerHTML+"</dt>";
        newString +="<dd>"+tds[5].innerHTML+"</dd>";
    }
    newString +="</dl>"
    document.body.innerHTML=newString;
    }
</script>

Anyway, I’ve done this sort of thing before and I realized that I’m using JavaScript for the sort of administrative scripting that other people would use Perl or Python for.

No, there’s nothing more to this post than that.

I just wanted to point it out since it struck me as interesting.

Does anyone else out there use JS for this sort of thing?

Or am I a complete weirdo?