One thing I really miss with Mars Edit are things like smart quotes and the like. I think they make your blog posts look vastly superior to using regular ASCII quotes. (Of course they don’t show up too terribly well in Helvetica – so I’m actually thinking of changing my body text for this blog to Garamond)

You might think replacing text with smart text filtered text would be easy. However most of the time in Mars Edit you are using a lot of HTML tags. Fortunately in Python there is a standard module called htmlparser which does a lot of the dirty work for you.

This tip is a tad longer than most of the ones I’ve posted in the past. However it illustrates two really, really useful techniques. The first is parsing HTML. The second is using regular expressions. First the code and then I’ll follow it with an explanation.

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One thing I wish MarsEdit did was handle footnotes gracefully. There are a few Applescripts out that help, but I didn’t care for them too much. Inspired by one script by Shimone Samuel, I wrote up my own. It doesn’t do a whole lot. It’s a Python – Appscript program that simply puts anchor and link tags around the selected text (assumed to be a number representing the footnote number) and makes it a superscript. It then puts on the clipboard boilerplate for the footnote with the proper links and anchors setup.

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