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93 lines
4.4 KiB
Plaintext
93 lines
4.4 KiB
Plaintext
URL Shortcuts in ELinks
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-----------------------
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One extremely useful and convenient feature in ELinks, which may not be very
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well known, is so-called URL rewriting. If you give ELinks a URL (by passing it
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on the command line, through the -remote magic device or, most frequently, by
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typing it to the Goto URL dialog), it has the ability to mangle it in certain
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ways before processing it. This mangling is called URI rewriting.
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What it does
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~~~~~~~~~~~~
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The URI rewriting can expand certain URL shortcuts to complete URLs. For
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example, if you type 'sd' to the Goto URL dialog, it will be rewritten to:
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http://www.slashdot.org/
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first, and then loaded. /.'s front page will be displayed.
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Further, if you type 'g elinks' to the Goto URL dialog, it will be rewritten to:
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http://www.google.com/search?q=elinks&btnG=Google+Search
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and then loaded, therefore, a Google search for the keyword 'elinks' will be
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performed. Note that you can separate the 'g' by either a space or a colon, so
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'g:elinks' will do the exact same thing.
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A large number of those shortcuts are already defined for you. You can browse
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Protocols :: URI Rewriting :: Dumb/Smart prefixes in the Options Manager for
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a complete listing of already defined shortcuts (press the [Info] button on
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a shortcut to see what it will be rewritten to). See below for details on how
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to enable or disable this rewriting and how to define your own shortcuts.
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How it works
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~~~~~~~~~~~~
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All the URI rewriting can be controlled by options in the 'protocol.rewrite'
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option tree.
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In the case of 'sd', a URI rewriting mechanism called 'dumb prefixes' is used.
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If protocol.rewrite.enable-dumb is true, ELinks looks at the contents of the
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protocol.rewrite.dumb.* tree, and if it finds option protocol.rewrite.dumb.sd,
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it will use its value as the target URI.
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Therefore, more generally speaking, if ELinks looks at
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protocol.rewrite.dumb.<typed_string>, and if it exists, will replace the
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entered URI with it. These dumb prefixes can be used as a kind of alternative
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bookmark systen - if you want to have fast access to a certain site and you
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don't want to spend a while navigating the bookmarks manager, you can just fire
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up the Goto URL dialog, type the shortcut and there you go.
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A dumb prefix can contain '%c', which will be replaced by the URI of the current
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document. This is used, for example, in the 'arc' dumb-prefix, which provides
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a shortcut to the Wayback machine at archive.org.
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In the case of 'g', a slightly different URI rewriting mechanism called 'smart
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prefixes' is used. If protocol.rewrite.enable-smart is true, ELinks looks at
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the contents of the protocol.rewrite.smart tree and, if it finds option
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protocol.rewrite.smart.g, it will use its value as the target URI.
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The difference is that the smart prefixes can take arguments and reference them
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in the target URI. As with dumb prefixes, '%c' in the URI means the current
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address. Additionally, '%s' will be substituted by the whole string following
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the prefix ('elinks' in the 'g' example above; '%s' is by far the most
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frequently used expansion), while you can reference individual space-separated
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arguments with the codes '%0' thru '%9'. Finally, if you want a plain % to the
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resulting URI, use '%%'.
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Note that the prefix searched in the protocol.rewrite.smart tree is everything
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in the typed address up to the first space or colon (so 'bug:123' and 'bug 123'
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are identical). These prefixes are generally useful for searching anything very
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fast - be it Google ('g:foo', 'gi:foo', 'gr:foo', ...), ELinks Bugzilla bugs
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('bug:1234'), the RFC database ('cr:foo'), or the Czech-English dictionary
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('czen:foo'). The only limit is your imagination.
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Alternative URI rewriting mechanisms
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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In the past, before this was implemented, Lua scripting did the job. And you
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still have complete control over the URI in the internal scripting goto-url
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hook. The advantages are clear - you get complete control over the URI and you
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can do many more interesting things with it. For example, there are some very
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advanced CVSweb and Debian package database URI prefixes implemented in the
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sample Lua hooks file. The one disadvantage to this is that you must have Lua
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scripting enabled in order to make use of it, and many users don't have Lua
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installed.
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///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
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///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
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