bs2html

Convert telnet://bs2.to backups to a static website.

Demo (converted from testbrd)

Installation

You need Haskell (ghc) and Stack, both of which can be found on most distribution's repostiories. After that, simply run in the repository:

$ stack install

This will download and compile all dependencies as well as the program, which may take a while. The resulting binary will be installed to ~/.local/bin/bs2html.

Alternatively, you may download generic x86-64 Linux binaries from GitHub's releases page. (Don't forget to chmod a+x it afterwards.)

Usage

$ bs2html --help
Usage: bs2html INPUT OUTPUT [--show-hidden] [--bsdconv] [--debug]
  Convert bs2.to backups to a static website

Available options:
  -h,--help                Show this help text
  INPUT                    Directory to bs2.to backup
  OUTPUT                   Output directory (created if non-existent)
  --show-hidden            Include hidden posts
  --bsdconv                Use bsdconv in $PATH to convert from BIG5 to UTF-8
  --debug                  Print debug information

Example

Download a .tar.gz backup from https://www.bs2.to and extract it to the current directory (Note that you may also use testbrd in the repository as an example):

$ tar xf P_foo.tar.gz
$ tree -a
.
└── brd
    └── P_foo
        ├── @
        ├── 0
        ...
        ├── .DIR
        ...

Convert to directory out:

$ bs2html brd/P_foo out
Parsing .DIR ... done
Converting articles to HTML [=======================>] 2273/2273
Generating index.html

This generates the website under the directory out, which you may view with:

$ ${BROWSER} out/index.html

Alternatively, you may host the generated static files with any HTTP servers of your choice.

Notes

Hidden articles

The utility by default does not convert restricted articles (隱文) in order to protect your privacy. Specify --show-hidden to force generation of restricted posts.

BIG5 decoding

Currently, two Big5 decoders are supported: iconv (default) and bsdconv. iconv's is part of the POSIX standard (thus widely available) but it outputs sub-optimal UTF-8 due to lack of UAO support and ambigious width handling in CJK characters. To convert ANSI arts used in BBS, considering using the bsdconv library by @buganini which offers additional functionality to handle aforementioned cases.

To enable the bsdconv decoder, ensure that bsdconv can be found in $PATH and pass the --bsdconv flag to bs2html.

TODO

• Implement search/filter functions on the index page.
• Thread-level navigation within article ([ and ]).
• Generate a fully local website without depending on CDN (Vaadin's CDN is slow).
• Factor out common article <style>'s to a separate CSS stylesheet.
• Minimize generated CSS/JS.
• Write a Haskell-binding for bsdconv instead of calling the program directly.