Handy Tools

Perhaps I had found myself doing the same tedious task again. Or perhaps the task at hand is going to be tedious. Either way, I will flex my muscles a bit to create little tools to help make my tasks less tedious.

This category is a place where I will publish such tools. If you find them useful as well, feel free to use them. :)

A simple tool to encode text for HTML

Part of my job scope as a Systems Analyst at ANZ is to create form applications for business to generate leads. There are times when business stakeholders gave me paragraphs of terms and conditions to include in my form applications. Thankfully, these paragraphs are usually formatted nicely in Microsoft word documents.

However, because these paragraphs are intended for humans to read, special characters are not presented in html entities.

To utilise my web hosting to the fullest, I had created a tool that help me encode such paragraphs for web browsers to render.

Code generator for list of countries

There was a second need for me to display a list of countries for my users to select. While the first required insertion of names of the countries into the database, the second required the list of countries to be populated as an array of data objects via Java.

Although the text list of countries from Pedro Posada is useful in both instances, it only fulfills part of what I need. In addition to the names, I need to include additional boiler plate coding to convert the text list of countries into usable forms for the two different programming requirements.

And since the list is more than a 100 items long, it will be more efficient to get the computer to generate the list of countries with the necessary boiler plate coding.