Product Reviews

Review: TextPipe Pro

A snazzy tool for making wholesale textual changes to a group of files.

• By Mike Gunderloy
• 02/06/2002

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 $129 to automate that? Probably so.