Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 01/23/07 15:01

Scripsit vjp2.at@at.BioStrategist.dot.dot.com:

> Is there like a way I can say something like this pseudocode?
>
> http://www.glop.com/flop.txt?#&%Find="slop"&#%Occurance=3

It would be better to explain what you mean than to write "pseudocode".
Spelling out the information in the Subject line would have been a good
idea - and would hopefully have emphasized that you mean a _plain text_
resource.

No, there is no way to refer to a particular location within a plain text
file with a URL.

> I want to post something in a blog where I put a pointer to a big file
> from which I want to show a small piece. But the blog as a size limit
> on posts (at least its spamblocker seems to).

I guess you mean "the blog has a size limit", but I cannot guess why you
mention this. How would a size limit affect links?

Anyway, what you _could_ do (technically) is to set up a relatively simple
server-side script that reads the content of a plain text file, passed to it
as a parameter, and extracts a given piece of it, specified (e.g.) by line
numbers, and returns the fragment specified that way. Then you could
construct a URL that refers to the script with the desired parameters.

In addition to the work needed to set up the script, there might be
copyright considerations. Such a script might be construed as a method of
making part of a work available to the public in a new way, so you might
need to copyright owner's permission. This is debatable, but I would not
risk getting sued just to make a reference more user-friendly; just
referring to the big file and asking people to look at lines 1042 through
1050, or something like that, would be simple enough.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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