A old text file with special format

Question

I am working on HP-UX project, there are a old document. Can open it with vim, but there are some special character among text. For example:

.P
   "xxxxx"
.AL 1 10
.LI  "xxx"
.H 3 "xxxx"

It looks like html but not be html. Is it possible convert it to modern document?

"Convert it to modern document?" Do you mean something like [Markdown](http://stackoverflow.com/editing-help)? — Tom Blodget, Jun 11 '14 at 04:27

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 11 '14 at 04:05

2

Looks like troff. Install GNU troff (Groff) and try:

groff -Thtml -pet -mm input.mm > output.html

answered Jun 11 '14 at 04:05

Kannan Goundan

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 11 '14 at 03:51

I guess more details are needed - some ideas you may try:

First, issue a file command for the file. It will probably tell you what type of file is.

jim@debian:~$ file foo.bar
foo.bar: ASCII text

Second, search for similar files and see if there's a program to open them in the machine - maybe, they are binary files for some program out there, and you just don't know which one.

Last, but not least, I believe you are right - looks like HTML code to me, so maybe this is used by an application as a kind-of intermediate language, that is parsed later to transform it to real HTML.

I hope this helps!

A old text file with special format

2 Answers2