Product Review
Review: TextPipe Pro
A snazzy
tool for making wholesale textual changes to a group of
files.
by Mike Gunderloy
How many times have you been faced with some text
that's almost but not quite right? Did someone have
their tabs set at three spaces where you want four? Are
the variable names not what you'd like? Is there extra
HTML markup cluttering what should be a simple README
file?
You've probably tackled these jobs in one of two
ways: just fix the darned things by hand in a text
editor, or write a macro to have the editor fix them. If
that's the case, it's time to learn about TextPipe Pro.
The idea is very simple: TextPipe Pro takes text, a
file, or a group of files, applies one or more filters,
and writes the changes back out. Filters can do nearly
anything you can imagine. Just a few examples:
- Add new text at the start or end of a line
- Reverse selected text
- Change case
- Strip out HTML markup
- Search and replace
- Word wrap or center text
- Number lines
- Extract e-mail addresses
- Transform text using a scripting language
Get the picture? It's darned powerful, but the user
interface makes the power easy to manage. You create new
filters from a menu, customize them, and use the Trial
Run button to see the overall effect on some text. When
you're satisfied, one button click does the work. Think
about this the next time you need to update all the
copyright notices on the corporate web site. Worth $299
to automate that? Probably so.
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