The formatting of AIM logs. [solved]

This Dude

So my computer saves logs of all my AIM conversations. I find it very useful to go back through and review some projects that my co-workers and I discuss.

Anyway, one of the logs with the co-worker I've been working with closest for the past three months is formatting weirdly when I open it up (they are saved as HTML documents and opened up through my browser). With everyone else I talk to, the format in the browser window is like this:

Me [timestamp]: blahblahblah
Them [timestamp]: blahblahblah

It's organized very nicely. With this person, however, it's all jumbled together:

Me [timestamp]: blahblahblah Him [timestamp]: blahblahblah

There are no breaks at any point and it makes it almost impossible to sort through. I've tried opening it in different browsers but it makes no difference.

Am I stuck with a jumbled mess or is there some way to make this intelligible?

Apothe0sis

Usually the way I'd do something like this would be via a perl script to extract the different bits, put them on separate lines and be done with it.

However, the traditional wisdom when dealing with html with regexes is "Here is a problem which I will deal with using regular expressions. Now I have two problems."

But given you're dealing with known formats it shouldn't be impossible. If you post some sample lines someone could probably bang out a 1 liner to get it done.

finalflight89

Quick and dirty: Use Notepad to find and replace "Him" with "<br>Him".

This Dude

The only problem is, when I open it in with Notepad, it looks like this:



It just gets a whole bunch more jumbled.

And Apothe0sis, I appreciate the help but unfortunately I am very stupid when it comes to computers. For example, I don't know what a perl script or regexes are. xD

Tox

That's fine. In notepad, click Edit -> Replace

Find What: <tr>
Replace With: <br><tr>

Save it, open it normally and it should show up properly.

This Dude

Oh I see now. The changes will be reflected when I open it in the browser.

I did it and it works! Thanks so much, everyone!