Font tags - File Exchange fix using Bulk Scanner (ISDN*tek)

[penguins_dont_fly]

@shipscriptor anybody else ...

I am in the process of stripping all of the garbage that eBay has added to my listings.

I ave sucessfully removed all <li style ... <ul style ... <p style and <span style ... using the Bulk scanner with File Exchange uploads (Thank You! Thank You!)

I now want to get rid of any extraneous font tags ... but I would like to leave one master <font></font> at beginning and end

There is an option in the bulk scanner to remove font tags (ebay) or font tags (all).

Can anybody tell me 1) what the difference is in those options  and 2) how to keep just ONE font open and close using the Bulk scanner?

Thanks!

for reference ... my (very simple) template looks like this ... I just copy/paste it to new listings and fill in the description 

<!-- MobileFriendlyTag -->
<style>img{max-width:100%}</style>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<div>
<!-- Font -->
<font rwr="1" size="4" face="Arial" font-family="Arial" font-size="14pt">
<!-- DescriptionHere -->
<ul>
<li>Description Text</li>
</ul>
<!-- StoreSignature -->
<p>Visit our eBay Store: <img src="https://pics.ebaystatic.com/aw/pics/icon/iconStoresNW_20x20.gif" alt="Go to member's eBay Store" title="" align="absmiddle" border="0"><a href="https://www.ebay.com/str/mystorename" target="_blank">MyStore</a></p>
</font>
</div>

[shipscript · Accepted solution]

@penguins_dont_fly

The tool will look for and strip all eBay font tags that include  rwr="1".  It will ignore any font tags that omit that attribute (unless you use the ALL option). The tool doesn't have the ability to leave one behind, but you could add your own font wrapper.  The one shown in your sample code may not do what you want anyway because I see some invalid attributes (some CSS fragments mixed with the HTML).

<font rwr="1" size="4" face="Arial" font-family="Arial" font-size="14pt">

One possible mechanism is to add a "div" wrapper and style it with CSS and that would standardize all of your text.

<div style="font-family:arial; font-size:14pt;">
...content here...
</div>

To accomplish that, you would use the <<+BEFORE>> and <<+AFTER>> features on the custom text filters to add the the opening <div> to the beginning and the closing </div> to the end.  You can test with the Active Content Sandbox tool.

I also like to contain the width of the text. I don't know what type of content you are posting, but if it contains paragraphs of text, you can prevent those stretching all the way across a wide monitor by setting the maximum allowed width. I like to constrain to about 700px max.

<div style="font-family:arial; font-size:14pt; max-width:700px; margin:auto;">
...content here...
</div>

The margin:auto will center the <div> within the page width. If you want to keep the <div> over on the left, then omit the margin:auto

Since I can't leave well-enough alone, I also like to add a border around my description so that it will stand out a bit from eBay's content and then indent the text a little from the border using padding of 1em (one character) wide.

<div style="font-family:arial; font-size:14pt; max-width:700px; margin:auto; border:4px solid gray; border-radius:10px; padding:1em;">
...content here...
</div>

[penguins_dont_fly]

Thanks @shipscript ... I'll play with it.

I just wish eBay would stop adding font tags and li style, etc stuff 😞

I've got some really weird looking listings because of sudden font changes that I didn't do 😞

And I'm starting to get the dreaded "Blank Box" Description because of too many nested font tags 😞 😞

I think I'm just going to strip all font tags and then use the div wrapper, like you suggested 🙂

[shipscript]

---

@penguins_dont_fly wrote:

And I'm starting to get the dreaded "Blank Box" Description because of too many nested font tags 😞 😞

---

I've asked our eBay team to bring the problem to the programmers, since we will be seeing a lot more of this as time goes by. The "blank box" is seen in Firefox browsers when nesting approaches 170-200 deep; and I think that depth of embedding occurs when listing a bunch of items at one time and using the previously created listing to sell-similar. By the end of the day, the last copy-of-a-copy can be nested quite deeply.

[penguins_dont_fly]

Thanks again to you Ship 🙂

I started the day planning on just updating the store link in my listings from stores.ebay.com/xx to the new url format www.ebay.com/str/xx

And then .... 4 uploads later ...

I think I have finally cleaned all of my listings of extraneus garbage that eBay "helpfully" added for me 🙂

The Bulk Scanner is Much appreciated 🙂 🙂

I eded up changing the max-width to 800px ... 700 just left this tiny little box in the center of my 27" wide screen HD monitor (still looks fine on my 10" tablet browser and on my laptop) ... and lightened the border ...

What It looks like now:

<!-- MobileFriendlyTag -->
<style>img{max-width:100%}</style>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<div style="font-family:arial; font-size:14pt; max-width:800px; margin:auto; border:1px solid gray; border-radius:10px; padding:1em">
<!-- DescriptionHere -->
<ul>
<li>Description Text</li>
</ul>
<!-- StoreSignature -->
<p>Visit our eBay Store: <img src="https://pics.ebaystatic.com/aw/pics/icon/iconStoresNW_20x20.gif" alt="Go to member's eBay Store" title="" align="absmiddle" border="0"><a href="https://www.ebay.com/str/flywel" target="_blank">FlyWel</a></p>
</div>

[shipscript]

Warning to all...

The Font Tag (eBay)  filter is brand new to the tool, and I have already found a limitation that applies to only this one filter.  The parsing is so tedious that discriptions with over 100K characters of source code might time out on the server, and the scan appears to not complete. When the limitation is encountered on one item, the other items will continue to scan, but the affected item will give up. So, until I find a viable alternative, that will be the limitation on that filter.

When the bulk scan fails to complete, the successfully processed descriptions will be available on the server, and I may be able to force a zip file of those if a user contacts me with their job number.

[shipscript]

Update... (warning retracted)

The Font Tag (eBay) filter has been updated to a different methodology to handle the complex parsing. The tool should now be able to completely scan a description that is 500K (500,000 code characters) in length, which is the maximum description size that eBay allows.  However, descriptions of that size will take a lot longer to scan than typical descriptions that are normally under 30K in size.