non-distro installation question
 

Hello,

I am trying to install a program that converts HTML to TXT, called html2text (can't post URLs yet, but got it from linux dot org, AppId 7912) which from what I can gather is quite a common piece of software.

I am using Red Hat Linux with the Fedora 3 core and am, unfortunately, only a standard user with no chance of any root access of any kind. To top it off I am brand new to this and trying to make sense of it all so any kind of help will be massively appreciated.

I downloaded the archive, decompressed it, went through the make process as described in the INSTALL documentation. However during make I get some messages regarding deprecated headers and it ends with:

format.C:377: error: `ostrstream' undeclared (first use this function)
format.C:377: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once for each function it appears in.)
format.C:377: error: expected `;' before "oss"
format.C:378: error: `oss' undeclared (first use this function)
make: *** [format.o] Error 1


I hope this isn't too much of a long shot, but partly due to my inexperience I wasn't sure of the best place to post, but it seemed such a stupid question that I felt it was fitting to reveal my newbie-ness.

Any thoughts or help greatly appreciated,

Thx!
:-)

K

p.s. if anyone has alternative methods to quickly strip a large set of htmls of their tags any such info would also be amazingly well appreciated

Welcome to LQ!

First, if you don't have root priviledges, you can't run "make install" to install the software. So that part is moot.

You may try to open the file with OpenOffice and then save it as a text file, but I don't think that will strip the html code.

Post all those error messages, not just "I get some messages regarding deprecated headers."

this is not a problem of privelegies. this can be because errors in sources or missing (old) header files.
this is an old homesite of this program. i've found there two versions of sources: one for old compilers and another for modern. try them. and here is new site, where you can simply get binary rmp for your system.

Incidentally, you need to be root to install rpms, so you won't be able to use that method.

In my limited experience, I've managed to install things to odd directories by adding some extra parameters to the ./configure command (along the lines of ./configure --INSTALLDIR=/home/pwc101/codecs), although this isn't always the case.

Another way is lynx -dump.

For instance I just d/l'd this page (as showthread.html) &: displayed it just fine.

did the conversion you seem to want.


would then automate the conversion you want.


If you don't have lynx on the system you are using, then look for links or elinks. They probably have a similar option (RTFM ;)). I don't have them, so I can't advise on their specifics.

BTW, the meaning of my ${X%htm?}txt can be found in the bash man page by searching for ${parameter%word}.

BTW#2, IMNSHO anyone who tells someone to "RTFM" referring to bash, w/o providing a search term, is a complete <insert_derogatory_but_correct_anatomical_reference_here>.

Thanks
 

Thanks guys,

it seems the initial problem was at least to do with privileges, not sure if the version I had was outdated as well, but in the end I managed to solve all my problems using lynx and a small perl script, so am particularly thankful for the lynx pointer ! :-)

But lots of thanks to all of you who spent your time helping me here!

THX!

:o)

K