Chase The Devil

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Using Linux to Recover Fucked Up Windows Data

Recently, one of my relatives computer under Windows XP, refused to boot. There was no way of fixing it with Windows Install CD as partition table seemed corrupt to Windows. I tried everything in an 2003 Ultimate Boot CD, but nothing worked out.

Someone gave me an install cd of Ubuntu Linux, and it managed to read the data. Well sometimes only. The erratic behaviour was due to a bad ATA cable. This probably was the cause of the corruption in the first place. Anyway with a new cable, Windows was still not able to read its data. But Ubuntu Linux, now working well, was able to, without having anything to configure (except mounting the drive).

So I copied the data, and reformated the NTFS partition, reinstalled Windows, recopied the data.

After this experience, I'd recommend to any Windows user to have a spare Ubuntu Linux Live CD, just in case your Windows corrupts itself.

Using Linux to Recover Fucked Up Windows Data

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Java HTML Parsing Example With htmlparser

Every week, I post javablogs top 10 most read blog entries on this blog. The reason for it was that I don't look at what's happening on the week-end and this will pickup interesting stories from the weekend, and I also don't watch javablogs everyday. Overall I find it quite good to be uptodate with interesting stuff happening on javablogs.

As mentionned in an earlier post my library of choice to do the parsing is htmlparser (on sourceforge) because it's free, open source and because I am lazy and did not want to do my own. If you know a better open source library, feel free to add a comment about it, I'll be glad to hear about it. htmlparser is not the easiest library to use, there are many entry points and it's not immediately clear which one to choose. So I post here how I used it if it can save a few minutes to people having to do this task.

  private static Entry parseEntry(String content) throws ParserException
  {
    final Entry entry = new Entry();

    final NodeVisitor linkVisitor = new NodeVisitor() {
      
      @Override
      public void visitTag(Tag tag) {
        String name = tag.getTagName();

        if ("a".equalsIgnoreCase(name))
            {
              String hrefValue = tag.getAttribute("href");
              if (hrefValue != null && !hrefValue.startsWith("http://"))
              {
                if (!hrefValue.startsWith("/")) hrefValue = "/"+hrefValue;
                hrefValue = "http://javablogs.com"+hrefValue;
                //System.out.println("test, value="+hrefValue);
              }
              if (hrefValue != null)
              {
                hrefValue = hrefValue.replaceAll("&", "&amp;");
                tag.setAttribute("href", hrefValue);                
              }
            }
      }
    
    };
    
    NodeVisitor visitor = new NodeVisitor() {

      @Override
      public void visitTag(Tag tag) {        
        String name = tag.getTagName();
            if ("span".equalsIgnoreCase(name) || "div".equalsIgnoreCase(name))
            {              
              String classValue = tag.getAttribute("class");
//                LOGGER.debug("visittag name="+name+" class="+classValue+"children="+tag.getChildren().toHtml());
              if ("blogentrydetails".equals(classValue))
              {
                Pattern countPattern = Pattern.compile("Reads:\\s*([0-9]*)");
                Matcher matcher = countPattern.matcher(tag.getChildren().toHtml());
                if (matcher.find())
                {
                  String countStr = matcher.group(1);
                  entry.count = new Integer(countStr).intValue();
                }
                
              }
              else if ("blogentrysummary".equals(classValue))
              {
                try
                {
                  tag.getChildren().visitAllNodesWith(linkVisitor);
                }
                catch (ParserException pe)
                {
                  LOGGER.error(pe,pe);
                }
                entry.description = tag.getChildren().toHtml();                 
                entry.description = entry.description.replaceAll("\\s+", " ");
              }
              else if ("blogentrytitle".equals(classValue))
              {
                try
                {
                  tag.getChildren().visitAllNodesWith(linkVisitor);
                }
                catch (ParserException pe)
                {
                  LOGGER.error(pe,pe);
                }
                entry.title =tag.getChildren().toHtml(); 
                entry.title = entry.title.replaceAll("\\s+", " ");
              }              
            }
            
      }

    };
    Parser parser = new Parser(new Lexer(new Page(content,"UTF-8")));
    parser.visitAllNodesWith(visitor);
        if (entry.title != null)
        {
          return entry;
        }
        else return null;
  }