Text Processing – Remove Accents from Characters

And here's a nice, simple, gawk one-liner :

$ gawk '/^\[/{match($0, /^\[ (.+?) \]/, k)} {print >k[1]".txt" }' entry.txt

This will work for any file size, irrespective of the number of lines in each entry, as long as each entry header looks like [ blahblah blah blah ]. Notice the space just after the opening [ and just before the closing ].

EXPLANATION:

awk and gawk read an input file line by line. As each line is read, its contents are saved in the $0 variable. Here, we are telling gawk to match anything within square brackets, and save its match into the array k.

So, every time that regular expression is matched, that is, for every header in your file, k[1] will have the matched region of the line. Namely, "entry1", "entry2" or "entry3" or "entryN".

Finally, we print each line into a file called <whatever value k currently has>.txt, ie entry1.txt, entry2.txt ... entryN.txt.

This method will be much faster than perl for larger files.

If you have a relatively simple file tree where you have only one level of directories, and where each directory contains a list of files but there are no sub directories, you should be able to do something like this (you can paste this directly into your terminal and hit Enter):

for dir in *; do    ## For each directory
 if [ "$(ls -A "$dir")" ]; then  ## If the dir is not empty
   for file in "$dir"/*; do      ## For each file in $dir
    i=0;                         ## initialize a counter
    ## Get the subject
    sub=$(grep ^Subject: "$file" | cut -d ':' -f 2-);
    ## get the date, and format it to MMDDYY_Hour:Min:Sec
    date=$(date -d "$(grep ^Date: $file | cut -d ':' -f 2-)" +%m%d%y_%H:%M:%S);
    ## the pdf's name will be <directory's name> _ <date> _ <subject>
    name="$dir"_"$date"_"$sub";
    ## if a file of this name exists
    while [ -e "$dir/$name".pdf ]; do
      let i++;                       ## increment the counter
      name="$dir"_"$date"_"$sub"$i;  ## append it to the pdf's name
    done;
    wkhtmltopdf "$file" "$dir"/"$name".pdf; ## convert html to pdf
  done
 fi
done

NOTES

• This solution requires wkhtmltopdf:

  Simple shell utility to convert html to pdf using the webkit rendering engine, and qt.

  On Debian based systems you can install it with

  sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf
  

• It assumes there are no files in the top level directory and only desired html files in all sub directories.

• It can deal with file and directory names that contain spaces, new lines and other unorthodox characters.

• Given a file dir1/foo with the contents of the example you have posted, it will create a file called dir1/dir1_020513_20:59:53_Civilized Discourse Construction Kit10.pdf