How to open a .xba BASIC file?
Posted: Tue Apr 01, 2008 1:58 am
I wanted to study some BASIC code from an extension published as an .oxt archive. So I extracted the BASIC files from the zip archive, as "Foobar.xba", e.g. It's very simple XML, with only a header element around the whole file, which is easy enough to ignore. But of course many of the operators and other punctuation characters are encoded as entities, as with HTML: & which makes the code rather difficult to read.
Is there some way to open such a file in OOo? File > Open in the BASIC editor naturally loads it into Writer as a text file--not very sensible. Do I have to install the extension in order to view the source comfortably?
Open in MSWord fails; Wordpad treats it as plain text. Open in Firefox almost works: it respects the XML header and decodes the entities, but also ignores all the whitespace: goodbye line breaks and indentation.
I must be missing something obvious again.
Is there some way to open such a file in OOo? File > Open in the BASIC editor naturally loads it into Writer as a text file--not very sensible. Do I have to install the extension in order to view the source comfortably?
Open in MSWord fails; Wordpad treats it as plain text. Open in Firefox almost works: it respects the XML header and decodes the entities, but also ignores all the whitespace: goodbye line breaks and indentation.
I must be missing something obvious again.