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Textreme

Textreme is a somewhat more unusual application for this website in that its purpose is what might be described as “serious” rather than being for entertainment purposes like the other applications.

I found myself needing to write one-off scripts in various languages (often Perl) to perform some kind of processing (usually to sort the wheat from the chaff) on text files of various origins (logfiles, CSV files, auditing files etc.) and decided that a versatile Windows-based tool would (a) save me from having to refresh my rusty skills in whatever language I was using and (b) provide a fast one-click solution in Windows rather than resorting to a console (or ‘command’) window. Some editors such as Notepad++  DO have some helpful functionality (such as stripping trailing spaces) but nowhere near enough for my requirements. So thus was born Textreme, which will do a variety of ‘string’-based functions (deleting sections, inserting into a specific place, switching bits around, etc.) upon text files. If you have a similar need to mine when I decided to write it then a little feedback would be nice just to let me know how you use it and whether it meets your needs.

What it does

The ‘Ini’ File

Try out Textreme

The Textreme ini file has 8 settings:

The TextEditor Setting: Allows you to use a text editor of your choice for pre- and post-viewing.

The FirstN Setting: Specifies how many ‘before and after’ pairs you can view using the ‘First [n] Lines’ button.

The Replace[With & Replace]With Settings: These are included because the statement parser relies upon the presence of square brackets to find the parameters within the statement. The help file gives examples of their usage.

The NoReplace setting: Default N and inhibits the ‘ReplaceWith’ action.

The UndoReplace Setting: Reverses the ‘ReplaceWith’ action before the line is written to the output file.

The LineNoSeparator Setting: Allows you to choose the separating character(s) between the line numbering and the text.

The WrapChars Setting: The set of characters that define when a word ends. Typically, punctuation.

As well as the General Settings that deal with such things as line numbers, and line-splitting, there are ten different ‘list’ actions that can be performed in various ways depending upon parameter choices, and if anyone decides to try it out and thinks “it would be good if it did THIS” then please send me an email with your suggestion by clicking on the button at the bottom of the page.

The  ten listed actions can be cascaded in a Function List so that many changes can be made in a single pass. You will, of course, have to bear in mind what effect your earlier functions will have upon what the later functions will have left to work with! There is a help file included, but the best advice I can offer is to try it out and see what it can do.

Version 3.1 Released

3.1 is a minor bugfix release.

Fixed in this version:

o Lines with only CR/LF (i.e. the 'null' string) were not being treated as 'blank' by the "Omit blank lines" function

o The progress bar can now be moved and is not "always on top"