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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T15:42:49+00:00

I’m struggling with this for few hours, but I can’t get it to work

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I’m struggling with this for few hours, but I can’t get it to work properly. What I wanna do is find a line 

<div id="content">

and add few lines below that contain some variables like

<div class="post">
    <h2 class="title"><a href="#">**var**</a></h2>
    <p class="meta"><span class="date">**var**</span>
    <span class="posted">Posted by <a href="#">**var**</a></span></p>
    <div style="clear: both;">
        &nbsp;
    </div>
    <div class="entry moreless">
        **var** 
    </div>
</div>

Is it possible? If so how?

–David

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There are much better tools available to solve this. But it is possible with Windows batch!

    Assume the text below is the outermost template file named TEMPLATE.HTML. The content trigger line can be indented, but this solution does not allow extra characters after the trigger. (This limitation could be solved, but it would slow things down)

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
  <title>Sample template for building a page</title>
  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
</head>
<body>
  <div id="content">
  </div>
</body>
</html>

    The sample content file below (named CONTENT_HTML.TXT) contains variables specified as !varName! and the batch file will use delayed expansion to perform the variable substitution. This means that if you want the content to contain an exclamation, it must be encoded somehow. There are two choices. One is to use the HTML character notation &#33; This works fine for text content, but will not work if you want an HTML comment. For comments I define an !X! variable that will be expanded to !

    <div class="post">
    <h2 class="title"><a href="#">!TITLE!</a></h2>
    <p class="meta"><span class="date">!DATE!</span>
    <span class="posted">Posted by <a href="#">!AUTHOR!</a></span></p>
    <div style="clear: both;">
        &nbsp;
    </div>
    <div class="entry moreless">
        Example with exclamation point&#33;<br />
        Another example with exclamation point!X!
    </div>
    <!X!--
      sample comment
    -->
</div>

    Finally here is a batch file that will put everything together and create an output file named FINAL.HTML. I hard coded the values for the variables, but they could just as easily be passed in as arguments.

    @echo off
setlocal enableDelayedExpansion
set X=^^^!
set TITLE=Sample HTML build
set DATE=%date%
set AUTHOR=Santa Clause
set TEMPLATE="template.html"
set CONTENT="content_html.txt"
set FINAL="final.html"

<%TEMPLATE% (
  for /f %%A in ('type %TEMPLATE%^|find /c /v ""') do (
      for /l %%N in (1 1 %%A) do (
      set "ln="
      set/p "ln="
      echo(!ln!
      set "test=!ln:*<=<!"
      if "!test!"=="<div id="content">" (
        for /f "usebackq delims=" %%L in (%CONTENT%) do echo(%%L
      )
    )
  )
)>%FINAL%

    There are some limitations with this solution

    1. Empty lines (lines containing nothing but spaces) will be stripped from the Content portion. Probably not a problem with HTML. Eliminating this limitation will complicate and slow down the solution.
    2. Lines beginning with ; will be stripped from the Content portion. This limitation is easily removed, but the code is ugly looking. It involves specifying <LF> as the EOL character in the final FOR /F loop.
    3. The Template file must use the Windows newline standard of <CR><LF>. Unix style files using <LF> will fail with this solution. This also can be solved, but again it will complicate and slow things down.
    4. As I stated earlier, the content trigger in the Template can have leading spaces, but it cannot have any trailing characters on the line. Removing this limitation will slow the process down.
    5. Lines are limited to 1024 characters in Template
    6. Trailing control characters are stripped from each line in Template
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