Microsoft .HLP files

whisp has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Does anyone have/know of PERL code that will dig the title out of a Microsoft .HLP file. I'm writing a process to scan directories and create a list associating the external file names with internal titles for each document within the directory. I have written code to deal with HTML, IBM BookManager and Acrobat PDF files (thanks in the last case to the PDF Function Library from CPAN) but HLP file structure is not obvious from looking in them nor does Microsoft seem to want to document these creatures. Does any one have any ideas? (Besides the obvious of not dealing with M/S' stuff.) Thanks!

Comment on Microsoft .HLP files

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Re: Microsoft .HLP files by little (Curate) on Jan 16, 2002 at 22:06 UTC
The only thing that jumps to my mind is to use WIN32::OLE that also ships with AvtivePerl and to browse and read trhough MS HTML Help 1.3 SDK Enjoy the reading. ;-) Have a nice day All decision is left to your taste	[reply]
Re: Re: Microsoft .HLP files by whisp (Novice) on Jan 16, 2002 at 23:58 UTC
Thanks. I'll dig around the WIN32::OLE piece & see if there is anything useful. MS HTML Help is a differnt critter, supposedly a replacement for the .HLP format.	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Microsoft .HLP files by little (Curate) on Jan 17, 2002 at 00:04 UTC
yep, MS now uses precompiled HTML which has the extension .chm, but the tools to create HTMLHelp files under Windows can convert the .hlp files to .chm files. So, even if its a lot of coding, but you can still use perl to automate that task and then read from the .chm file or dig really deep into the API and read from the tool you control to read in the old format. grin Have a nice day All decision is left to your taste	[reply]
Re: Microsoft .HLP files by dhable (Monk) on Jan 17, 2002 at 00:03 UTC
Do you have the source files for the .HLP. The source is nothing more than a RTF document with some special formatting. You could just spin through the RTF documents and pull out the necessary information. Of course that doesn't help you if you have HLP files from other sources.	[reply]
Re: Re: Microsoft .HLP files by whisp (Novice) on Jan 17, 2002 at 00:43 UTC
Unfortunately, all the .HLP files are from elsewhere. I don't have access to the source.	[reply]


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