A C to HTML translator

Suppose you want to post your code on your web page, but you want to make it look as "beautiful" as it does in the gvim editor. (Or at least you want it to do something basic like colorizing the comments). Such a task is easily and efficiently automated with a scripting language. Download either c2html.pl or c2html.py. (Verify the path in first line, chmod u+x ...) Grab a short little C program, like julia.c

Then either 

c2html.py julia.c > test.html

and/or 

c2html.pl julia.c > test.html

Have a look at test.html in your browser. It should look like this.

Now, if you are using the latest Konquerer web browser that launches from the KDE desktop of Linux, you will be puzzled by what is going on. Konquerer automatically colorizes source code, depending on the file extension. This means that when you open a file with .c on the end, the browser itself will add colors. The latest versions of Mozilla and I.E. do not colorize source code, as far as I know. This colorizing exercise is appropriate only if your browser is displaying C code in black and white.

The regular expressions in these examples are very simple, in fact the program tries to turn off the regular expression syntax: \.c$ uses \. to mean literal . and not the metacharacter .. Likewise, * is a quantifier in regular expressions, hence the use of /\* when looking for /*. The $ means "end of string", a genuine use of regular expression syntax. Except for that, these examples are really doing a simple string match and substitution, and are not using the full power of regular expressions. Maybe you can think of more elaborate code beautifiers to program. I did, with f90tohtml, for which regular expressions of Perl were absolutely essential.