ASP (VBScript) Q.

Seth Brundle

I am trying to do the following and can't figure out how:
Before a block of text is inserted into a database i want to search it for certain domains (e.g. http://www.boards.ie[...]). Thats easy enough!
But I then need to get the entire link, encode it and then append it onto another link (so that it will be link1 & encodedLink).
I then have to do this for any instances of this domain within the text.

To make matters even more complicated, the domain will probably (but not definitley!) be within HTML so the following characters could be ", >, < or a space (and possibly even more!)

Is it possible?
Should I just give up?

ron_darrell

That's more a programming question that specifically an ASP or VBScript question. Do you know the domains in advance ? If you do then it's just a simple search. Loop through the text looking for examples of the domain. Have an array variable holding the number of occurences of each domain. Once the loop is finished loop through the array outputting each link and then perform whatever action you are looking to perform with the generated links.

If you don't know the domains in advance i.e. if you are looking to examine all possible links in a block of text then you've a much more complicated problem. You'll need to research regular expressions (do a google for "regexp vbscript asp" and you should find a tutorial relevent to the language you are using).

Hope that was a little help. If I may ask, why do you need to do this?

-RD

Seth Brundle

Im doing it to create ebay affiliate adverts. Any ordinary ebay link can be encoded and then appended onto a fixed ebay link.
Cheers! I never thought of that approach!
I found some code online which I hacked to form the function below:

<%
Function EncodeEbayHyperlinks(inText)
Dim objRegExp, strBuf, ebayAffiliateURL
Dim objMatches, objMatch
Dim Value, ReplaceValue, iStart, iEnd

  ebayAffiliateURL = "http://affiliate.ebay.ie/whatever/url?"
  strBuf = ""
  iStart = 1
  iEnd = 1
  Set objRegExp = New RegExp

  objRegExp.Pattern = "\b(http\://www.ebay\.|http\://cgi\.ebay\.|www.ebay\.|ebay\.|cgi\.ebay\.)\S+\b"
  objRegExp.IgnoreCase = True                   ' Set case insensitivity.
  objRegExp.Global = True                       ' Set global applicability.
  Set objMatches = objRegExp.Execute(inText)
  For Each objMatch in objMatches
    iEnd = objMatch.FirstIndex
    strBuf = strBuf & Mid(inText, iStart, iEnd-iStart+1)
      strBuf = strBuf & ebayAffiliateURL & Server.UrlEncode(objMatch.Value)
    iStart = iEnd+objMatch.Length+1
  Next
  strBuf = strBuf & Mid(inText, iStart)
  EncodeEbayHyperlinks = strBuf
  Set objRegExp = Nothing
End Function
%>

I tested it with several ebay links and so far - so good!
Thanks Ron

Seth Brundle

Hmmm Friday night @ 11pm & after a hard day at work (coding) and here I am playing with code!
I need to get a life!