NAME

hxaddid - add IDs to selected elements

SYNOPSIS

hxaddid [ -x ] [--] elem|.class|elem.class [ file-or-URL ]

DESCRIPTION

The hxaddid command copies an HTML or XML file to standard output, while adding element IDs to the specified elements or classes.

For example, given the input

<p>A paragraph without an ID</p>

the command

hxaddid p

will output

<p id="a-paragraph">A paragraph without an ID</p>

If you specify a class using .class then IDs will only be added to elements that contain that class. And if you specify an element and a class using elem.class then IDs will only be added to the specified elements that contain the specified class.

If two elements would naturally generate the same ID, a number is added to the ID name (starting with 0) to make sure the IDs are unique. IDs are not added to matching elements that already contain an ID.

OPTIONS

The following options are supported:

-x: Use XML conventions: empty elements are written with a slash at the end: <IMG />. Also causes the element to be matched case-sensitively.

OPERANDS

The following operands are supported:

elem: The name of element to select.
.class: The name of class to select.
elem.class: The name of element that contains class to select.
file-or-URL: The name or URL of an HTML or XHTML file.

EXIT STATUS

The following exit values are returned:

0: Successful completion.
> 0: An error occurred in the parsing of one of the HTML or XML files.

ENVIRONMENT

To use a proxy to retrieve remote files, set the environment variables http_proxy or ftp_proxy. E.g., http_proxy="http://localhost:8080/"

BUGS

Assumes UTF-8 as input. Doesn't expand character entities. Instead pipe the input through hxunent(1) and asc2xml(1) to convert it to UTF-8.

hxaddid tries first to generate "readable" IDs, by forming the ID out of the letters and digits found in the content of the element and falls back to generating arbitrary IDs if it doesn't find enough. However, the algorithm in this version is primitive and only gives reasonable results for ASCII letters and digits.

Remote files (specified with a URL) are currently only supported for HTTP. Password-protected files or files that depend on HTTP "cookies" are not handled. (You can use tools such as curl(1) or wget(1) to retrieve such files.)