in reply to search and using first letter of words on a line

I'm having trouble groking how this helps:

<p><font size="-1><a href="#PINPAORToc" name="PINPAORTxt" style=text-decoration:none">...

The font size leaves me puzzled on two counts:
  1. since you're using css && your goal is reducing file size, why not make and use a one- or two-letter class name (saving at least two chars update: note 1)? ( sm(all) comes to mind). and...
  2. Why would you chose a font-size of -1 on a tiny-screen device?

Also:

Why are you bothering with name="..." when you're trying to reduce the char count. Yes, it's often good form for public HTML but on your fone?

If the original HTML is borked ( </center> ? ) and with other close tags out-of-order ( </b> before </font> (which is never seen) ), why not clean it up, first? I've often found that HTML that's as bad as what you display is also outrageously bloated. Think TIDY or maybe one of the HTML::... modules

Note 1 (an update): TANSTAAFL applies: I should say 'save two chars per instance, after paying back the overhead of the style def in the <head>' of course. But a style...</style> section in the head could also provide abbreviations for the likes of style=text-decoration:none

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Re^2: search and using first letter of words on a line
by Anonymous Monk on Sep 23, 2011 at 02:51 UTC

    <quote>I'm having trouble groking how this helps:

    <font size="-1><a href="#PINPAORToc" name="PINPAORTxt" style=text-decoration:none">... The font size leaves me puzzled on two counts:</quote>

    I really appreciate the help and actually I have some things to look at to help makes things leaner for sure. But my question, the only thing I really need answered ATM is:
    How can I extract the first letter from each word in a string and join them together?
    I have been searching and it looks like perhaps using perl I need to use the substr, split, and join functions, so if anyone might be able to provide some sort of example I would be grateful.
    It seems like it might be a similar request to extracting the first letter of names in a generated list or file?

    I am uncertain if a sed example might help but something I have tried in sed is:

    sed -ri 's/<b>([A-Za-z])([A-Za-z:,]{0,20})[ ]{0,1}([A-Za-z]{0,1})[ ]{0,1}([A-Za-z:,]{0,20})[ ]{0,1}([A-Za-z]{0,1})[ ]{0,1}([A-Za-z:,]{0,20})[ ]{0,1}([A-Za-z]{0,1})(.*)<\/b>/<font size="-1"><a href="#\1\3\5\7Toc" name="\1\3\5\7Txt" style="text-decoration:none">\1 \2 \3 \4 \5 \6 \7 \8<\/a><\/font><br>/' 1.html

    which is getting a little unruly not to mention I am limited to capturing on the first letters of the first four words in the string because sed only has nine memory buffers to recall from, so I think by turning to perl I will give myself a lot more options to do what I want.

    cheers nap

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[d/l]
      For what you're defining as your "need ...ATM," is there some problem with the solution offered in Re: search and using first letter of words on a line? It works: 
      #!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
# 927275
use 5.012;

my @title = ("Part II: Nietzsche's Project, An Overall Review", "Learn
+ing Perl, 5th Ed.", "Mastering Regular Expressions");
for my $title(@title) {
    my $acronym = join '', ($title =~ /(?:^|\s+)(\w)/g);
    say $acronym;
}

=head OUTPUT

PINPAOR
LP5E
MRE

=cut

      [download]

      Of course, your spec leaves a little to be desired: how will you distinguish among Parts I, II and III of your first title?

      If your problem is in applying that answer to <a href="file:///foobar baz">Bazing with foo</a>, then you need to consider something on the order of HTML::Parser or another of the HTML::... modules.

      If you have some other stumbling block in your way, pray detail it, but without teaching Grandmother how to cook eggs with sed.

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[d/l]
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