--- layout: post title: "Perl in the office" date: 2014-01-17 00:36 comments: true categories: [Perl, Office, Dirty Hacks] --- Today Perl helped me again to solve a boring office problem. The colleagues gave me a presentation with almost 1000 slides. It was designed for a theatre subtitles. The slides was simple. Just a sentence per each slide. Only the colors was mistaken. Not black on white but white on black. My colleagues spent hours in googling for M$ Office bulk color change function. Then something blinked in me. **It was Perl's Regex {}**. The new open Office formats - [ODF](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument) and [OOXML](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML) are both zipped XML files, binary media content and files with metadata. I converted the presentation to odt (It was on the old crappy ppt) and then, just {% codeblock lang:bash %} lin:/tmp/presentation$ unzip slides.odp Archive: slides.odp extracting: mimetype inflating: content.xml inflating: META-INF/manifest.xml inflating: settings.xml inflating: styles.xml inflating: meta.xml inflating: Thumbnails/thumbnail.png {% endcodeblock %} The interesting file for me was **content.xml**. It's a verry big XML text file, so it's hard to be read both by a human and a text editor, but Sublime Text withstand. Because the slides were very simple, there was only one text style. So, here is the interesting stanza: {% codeblock lang:xml %} {% endcodeblock %} I just changed **' fo:color="#ffffff" '** to **' fo:color="#000000" '** with a Perl oneliner: {% codeblock lang:perl %} lin:/tmp/presentation$ perl -p -i -e 's/fo:color=\"#ffffff\"/fo:color=\"#000000\"/g' content.xml {% endcodeblock %} And then, zip again.. {% codeblock lang:bash %} lin:/tmp/presentation$ zip foo.odp content.xml meta.xml mimetype settings.xml styles.xml adding: content.xml (deflated 97%) adding: meta.xml (deflated 47%) adding: mimetype (deflated 6%) adding: settings.xml (deflated 37%) adding: styles.xml (deflated 97%) lin:/tmp/presentation$ zip -r foo.odp META-INF adding: META-INF/ (stored 0%) adding: META-INF/manifest.xml (deflated 71%) lin:/tmp/presentation$ zip -r foo.odp Thumbnails adding: Thumbnails/ (stored 0%) adding: Thumbnails/thumbnail.png (deflated 4%) {% endcodeblock %} And.. voilĂ ! (The image is just an example. I cannot show the real one.) ![picture alt]({{ root_url }}/images/PerlInTheOffice/foodotodt.png "The slide, finnished") PS: I changed the background from Powerpoint. It was easy in the GUI way :D