So, an XML file or web post lists a bunch of colour specs like; 0x1e93c6, 0xf2b827, 0xd6563c, 0x6a5c9e, 0x31a35f; and you want to see what they look like.
You could paste each one into a colour viewer, but I couldn't find any tool to take them all at once. The following code takes random text containing hex colour strings, and creates an HTML file of square colour swatches.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
# hextoswatch.pl - Extract colour strings from random code or HTML.
# Currently only looks for 0xRRGGBB and #RRGGBB.
#
# perl hextoswatch.pl < source.txt > swatch.html
#
# and then open swatch.html in a browser!
#
# Chars that make up a colour string:
#
my $hexRegex = '0-9a-zA-Z';
my $colRegex = "#x$hexRegex";
my @hexSs = ();
while ( <STDIN> )
{
chomp;
my @words = split /[^$colRegex]/;
push @hexSs, (grep /^(0x|#)[$hexRegex]{6}$/, @words);
}
map { s/^(0x|#)(......)/$2/ } @hexSs;
#print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "<HTML>\n\n";
print "<HEAD>\n";
print "<TITLE>Colour swatches from random text</TITLE>\n";
print "</HEAD>\n\n";
print "<BODY><TABLE BORDER=1>\n";
print "<TR>";
my $cell = 0;
foreach my $hex ( @hexSs )
{
print "<TD BGCOLOR='#$hex'>",
"<FONT COLOR='white'>$hex</FONT><BR><BR>",
"<FONT COLOR='black'>$hex</FONT></TD>";
if ( $cell++ gt 4 )
{
$cell=0; print "</TR>\n</TR>"
}
}
print "</TR></TABLE></BODY></HTML>\n";