View local html file with .asp extension in browser - html

Question

Hi I have crawled a website for offline view, but many pages are downloaded and saved as .asp and there are links that point to these pages. But when I open these html page that has .asp extension in Chrome browser, the chrome will download the page instead of rendering the page. Is there a way to set the chrome to render the page instead of downloading it ?
Thanks

Answer 1

Chromium uses the system mime-type for the local files. On Linux you can change it in the xdg-open configuration:
$ mkdir -p ~/.local/share/mime/packages
$ cd ~/.local/share/mime/packages
$ touch application-x-asp.xml
Then edit the ~/.local/share/mime/packages/application-x-asp.xml:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info">
<mime-type type="text/html">
<comment>Active Server Page</comment>
<icon name="text-html"/>
<glob-deleteall/>
<glob pattern="*.asp"/>
</mime-type>
</mime-info>
to set up the mime-type to text/html. On te end you have to logout/-in again, or just run:
$ update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications
$ update-mime-database ~/.local/share/mime

Answer 2

When your browser opens a file it uses the MIME type to decide which action it should take, typically download or open in the bowser.
So, for example, it encounters a zip file it will open the file save dialogue box and allow you to save the file.
And, if for example, you request a .asp from your browser which is served from a web server the browser will use the MIME type to decide which action to take, which will be to display in the browser.
The MIME type will be sent within the http headers and this would not be sent to the browser when you open your off-line .asp pages.
So if you could change the MIME type to "text/html" for .asp it should open it in the browser.
Unfortunately, there does not seem to be an option for changing MIME type / actions in Chrome.
You can change these setting in Firefox within Tools > Options > Content > FileTypes > Manage..

Answer 3

There is a way to open local, .asp files as HTML in Firefox.
Find your Firefox profile folder. On Windows 7, I found it here:
C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\738xdie.default\mimeTypes.rdf
Then add these lines to mimeTypes.rdf
<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mimetype:text/html"
NC:fileExtensions="asp"
NC:description="ASP Pages"
NC:value="text/html"
NC:editable="true">
</RDF:Description>
Restart browser. Your local file will now render as HTML.
There may be a similar technique with Chrome.

Answer 4

I suppose you want to view downloaded pages directly, that is not via some local web-server. Then I'd suggest to change (or append) file extensions during download according to their reported content-types from response headers. Of course, this will require to adjust all links to changed filenames inside other files. The other approach could be to store content-type of each page in a meta-base, and using a local web-server to serve the files according to their actual types from the base, not file extensions.

Answer 5

I have two solutions for you. the first one is to open those files with firefox.. and that's it..
if you insist to open them with chrome. you have to change all files extension to html instead of asp. use some programs for renaming..
but the links will be broken between pages..
so you have to find the js file that all pages use add this code in it to fix the links
document.body.addEventListener('click',function(e){
if(e.target.nodeName=='A'){
e.preventDefault()
href=e.target.href.split('/')
href[href.length-1]=href[href.length-1].replace('.asp','.html')
href=href.join('/')
parent.location=href
}
})
})