John R. Bayley - Telephone List Generator

Telephone Directory 1.1

Generate a quick and easy telephone directory listing for your Intranet or your business. This strip takes a simple CSV file and generates a colourful easy to use telephone listing.

Features include

Auto sorting of directory entries.
Adjustable coloured entries for easy reading.
Auto generation of indexes to allow quick scrolling to entries.
Auto generation of titles for each letter used.
Auto capitalising of first character for easy reading.
Uses perl's strict.

Written in perl this script takes a simple comma separated variable file (CSV) and turns it into an indexable web page. The telephone directory is sorted and coloured alternately dark and light for easy reading. First instances of any letter causes the script to generate a title bar for that character which is indexed using the "a name" tag to simplify searching. For an example of this click on the alphabet on the left. If a name of that letter is present in the list then the script jumps to that location.

Try the script out for yourself by clicking on the alphabet in the window above, or the small popup window.

Instructions for the installation of the script are here.

CSV files can be easily generated using a spreadsheet such as Excel or if you wish a simple text editor. Comma separated variables means just that a list of variables separated by comas. This is one of the most common of data files for spreadsheets or even databases. For ease of maintenance you can even write comments and notes within the CSV file. Any lines beginning with a hash '#' are ignored and not generated into the listing.

What do I need

The script requires a perl interpreter to run. Perl is common on most unix systems simply set the script as executable and run it from the shell by typing telephone.pl

The script is intended for use with the apache web sever this is the reason for generating html output. If you do not have apache or simply want a telephone listing then run the script and redirect the output to a file. Typing

telephone.pl > tele.html will redirect the html into a file called tele.html which you can use in your browser normally.

What does it cost.

Nothing as long as you do not use it to make money. Have my script for free.