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Listify, Convert Raw Text To HTML Elements

Monday, August 30th, 2010

What is Listify?

Listify is a very simple free service for web developers and designers, which allows you to convert raw text to html’s ‘list’ or ‘option’ elements by choosing various options like delimiter, type of lists and ignoring digits. I got this idea when I was working on the Clinova project. I had to insert the names of all the countries in the landing page of the site. To do that, I had to insert all the names within a <select> tag. You can very well understand the kind of time that would have been wasted doing it manually. So I went ahead and wrote a short piece of code in C, which would accept a text file with the country names and generate another text file with the <select> tags appended to the names. It saved a great amount of time which I utilized to do something else (I most probably saw an episode from How I Met Your Mother). Anyway, so when I started with Codeigniter, I thought, rather than wasting my time on creating a demo useless project, why not convert that C program to an online tool. Hence, came Listify. This is still in Alpha stage and we would love to hear some suggestions for new features that you would like. Drop us a feedback here feedback@code-pal.com or leave a comment here.

How will it help?

Using listify you can speed up your HTML coding process when you need to include large lists or option elements in your code. For example, if you require option elements like country names, then you would have to add the tags to 257 names, which obviously will take some time. Using Listify, it would take just three seconds.

How to use it?

Using Listify is pretty easy. All you have to do is paste the text in the text box above, configure your options as per your requirements and just click on the generate button. You can place any raw text and choose a delimiter to divide it into the list / option elements. Basically, it involves three steps to generete list via Listify:

• Copy text from your desired source and paste it in the text box.
• Paste it in the text box, configure the options.
• Copy the generated list from the dialog box, paste it in your code

Now you can utilise your saved time the way you want to

What are these options?

List Type This option enables you to choose what kind of list you want generated. Whether it is a list element  for an unordered / ordered list or an option element <option> element for the <select> tag. Ignore Digits Many a times there are unwanted numerical digits present in the text which we do not want to be included in the list / option item. This option enables generating the list ignoring the digits present in the text. For example, if you want to convert a numbered list to an unordered list, then just copy the list, select this option and the list items will be generated without the numbers.

Delimiter A delimiter is a sequence of one or more characters used to specify the boundary between separate, independent regions in the text you want to be converted. It means that how you want your text to be divided into the list elements. For example, if a text is a,b,c and the delimiter is , then the list will be generated as<li>a</li><li>b</li><li>c</li> By default, if no delimiter is entered then it will consider “return” or “new line” as the delimiter. For space as a delimiter, you need to enter space etc.

Let me know if it was useful and feedback for improvements and bugs are most welcome.

Recent Updates:

Updates on February, 08, 2011

• Added option to create main navigation structure.
• Added new option for generating option elements with the value attribute.
• Added new options for generating li elements with hyperlink tags or span tags within them.
• Ability to create Ordered/Unordered lists.

Use Listify!

Tags: codeigniter, convert, li, Listify, option, tag, text to html entities, tool
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