still alive, still reading comics
I haven’t written anything about programming in a long time, now. I stopped when I was work on my Advent calendar and never really got back to writing in my journal. I’m still doing plenty of coding, I’m just not writing about it here much.
I’ll have to fix that.
What I have been doing, though, is reading comics. I downloaded an archive of comics that are no longer in print, and they came in CBR format. It’s basically a rar-compressed file with a bunch of images. I’ve been reading them with the excellent OS X program Sequential. It’s the first program I’ve used for reading comics that made the experience enjoyable.
I hit a snag, though. It uses OS X’s “smart” file sorting, which is often pretty stupid. For example, given these two files:
Report 21.doc
Report 123.doc
…it will sort them in the order shown above. That makes sense, but it’s not what things expect, and it’s sometimes a problem. For example, the comics contained images like this:
Page 01.jpg
Page 02.jpg
Page 0304.jpg
Page 05.jpg
That third file is a two-page spread. Traditional asciibetical sort would put them in the correct order, but the stupid OS X sort did this:
Page 01.jpg
Page 02.jpg
Page 05.jpg
Page 0304.jpg
That’s because 304 is larger than 5.
Fortunately, the comic book archive format is really simple and stupid, and I was able to batch convert everything like this:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use 5.010;
use strict;
use warnings;
use autodie;
for my $file (<*.cbr>) {
say $file;
(my $dir = $file) =~ s/\.cbr\z//;
mkdir $dir;
chdir $dir;
system(unrar => e => "../$file");
my @files;
for my $image (grep { -f } <*>) {
(my $new = $image) =~ s/-([0-9]{2})([0-9]{2})\./-$1,$2./g;
rename $image => $new if $new ne $image;
push @files, "$dir/$new";
}
chdir "..";
system(zip => "$dir.cbz" => @files);
system(rm => -rf => $dir);
unlink $file;
}
I’m sure it has a big pile of problems, but it let me read my comic book pages in the right order and took about five minutes to write. Thanks, Perl.