Quote:
Originally Posted by Argel
I've had to do this many hundreds of times over the years
|
Wouldn't it have been
substantially easier if you just wrote it
once and ran it as needed?
Gideon,
Most Search & Replace functions are a limited form of regular expressions (regex). What both Jellby and Argel have just posted are forms of regex. Granted, Jellby went hardcore and Argel gave more generalized info, but they're still regex.
I mentioned RegexBuddy because its a decent way to learn. It allows you to create a formula and save it in a library for future use. It also explains what the formula is doing in English. A feature whose value cannot be stressed enough - try re-reading Jellby's formulas again. Complex regex is not easy to understand. (Try understanding the expression halfway down
this post if you think I'm kidding...)
You could create a Search & Replace (that is, regex) expression for every change needed in this file, and then save them all individually. You could start a new regex formula, load every one of the expressions you just made into one humongous formula, find the correct "stacking order" so they're all processed correctly, and issue one command to fix the whole file. This humongous formula could be saved as well. And, if you ever need it again, you could load, run and be done almost instantly (at least for the "hands on" portion of the work, conversion would take a bit of time, of course).
You do not have to use any of the software that has been mentioned. You can, as others have mentioned, very easily use almost any existing software that you are comfortable with - providing it can perform the necessary tasks.