How was it done now???

[KyrosKrane]

Dunno much about Perl, but I recognized enough to figure out what you're trying to do. Here's a PHP script that can do that.

Call a page like:
http://www.someserver.com/somedir/index.php?string=(link_here)

The page contains:

extract ($_GET);

$value = hexdec(substr($string,1,6));
echo "\nDecimal value of first six of query string is " . $value;
if ($value > 100000)
    echo "\nValue is over 100,000; Lucy link would not be valid.";
else
    echo "\nLucy link for URL is <a href=\"http://lucy.allakhazam.com/item.html?id=" . $value . "\">http://lucy.allakhazam.com/item.html?id=" . $value . "</a>"; 

You now have the item ID in $value and can do whatever with it. Naturally, you can adapt this to your needs and call whatever page you want.

To call from within EQ, you would type:

/www www.someserver.com/somedir/index.php?string=(link_here)

[Gaell Stormracer]

True, but my idea was to minimize the typing you have to do inside EQ with my trick, "/www <itemlink>" opens up the search result page for the item, or if set to the Lucy mode, opens up the Lucy page by item ID, which is useful for things like those mechanoinstruction scraps.

I'll have a dig at the firefox plug-in idea at any rate

[Rawckett]

How do I get my head to stop spinning?

[Gaell Stormracer]

Well, today's patch message may still make this idea moot:

- A new integrated web browser has been added to EverQuest. This web browser will be accessible from either the help menu or the /petition command. From this point forward, all problems related to switching to an external browser will be eliminated because this browser will pull up in an in-game window.

-- or may make it a LOT more useful

[KyrosKrane]

I'm leaning towards useful, but it depends on the flexibility of the browser. If it only loads the petition system, then it's useless to us. If it's flexible enough to (try to) load any page the user wants, then it can be adapted.

[Chatoyan]

Being able to load up eqtraders from within EQ itself would be handy. I normally just alt-tab between the two, but I find that EQ tends to crash when switching back to full screen mode afterwards.

[Gaell Stormracer]

From the patched files, it seems to be using the Mozilla engine (same that's used in Firefox) so it should be eminently tweakable

[Aelfin]

if you want Tango to capture the id for you, and the EQ response really looks like

Could not find player 0032CE000000000000000000000000000000007ECE4F07Wate

then a pattern like this should do it:

~Could not find player (?<id>[0-9A-F]{6})~/copy ${id}

that will just copy the id to your clipboard

expand on that last part however you'd like:

~Could not find player (?<id>[0-9A-F]{6})~/copy /www myserver.com/decodefwd.php?itemid=${id}

[Gaell Stormracer]

I know, but what I had in mind was to create a plug-in that could trigger the web page request itself rather than needing to be pasted back into EQ - maybe with a /www command for Tango. I started looking at your example plug-in, but I don't know C# at all, so it's a steep learning curve.

(It would be nifty if that could be a core part of Tango.... )

[Aelfin]

I know, but what I had in mind was to create a plug-in that could trigger the web page request itself rather than needing to be pasted back into EQ - maybe with a /www command for Tango. I started looking at your example plug-in, but I don't know C# at all, so it's a steep learning curve.

(It would be nifty if that could be a core part of Tango.... )

i'd be very hesitant about that. tango sees everything in a log. what you type and what others type. that's how it can react to a raid leader adding a pattern. raid leader says !addpat xxxxx and everyone running tango that "sees" him say it adds the pattern. something like !www is just asking for trouble. troublemaker_01 tells the guild, '!www pornandviruswebsite.com' or platseller_9456 tells you, '!www myplatsite.com'

honestly, !speak can be annoying enough. !www would probably be too ugly.

[KyrosKrane]

Check your log file. There's actually a control character at the start and end of the item string, usually displayed as a small box in text editors. That caused me to stumble at first when I whipped up the PHP snippet above, and it took me a moment to notice that character and account for it.

[Gaell Stormracer]

KyrosKrane: There's a &#37;12 encoded entity in the URL, but that isn't written to the log. Still, it's easy enough to check the format for the actual string that's reported.

Aelfin: Well, the file watcher and pattern save commands aren't in the patterns file either, so similarly the /www wouldn't be part of that - only "cleaned up" patterns would be invoked.

Anyhow, I'm playing with using the "keywords" URL part in Firefox at the moment, with a cgi script to do a meta-refresh redirect -- I'd prefer to do that with JavaScript if I can, to avoid having to hit a 3rd-party website -- unless, naturally, the EQtraders search engine itself can be tweaked to work with it...

[Gaell Stormracer]

Looks like the browser only goes to the SOE pages, with no ability to enter a URL... at least without some UI fiddling.

[Gaell Stormracer]

Did another version using VBscript since it should work on all WinXP and Vista boxes without needing to install Perl.

Again, some (slight) editing of files needed.

[KyrosKrane]

Interesting. I'd have to test, but if the ObjShell.run method is similar to the run box from the Start menu, you could change line 29 to

objShell.run(URL)

That would invoke the system's default browser, and you wouldn't have to worry about file paths. You'd still have to edit the registry file, though.