Messy Mac Text. Clean It Up Now With Clean Text.

Bonobo said:

I do think that BBEdit might have been slighted a bit.

There are Search & Replace using both common characters, but mostly GREP strings that cause people to roll their eyes.  Learning a few things about GREP from the built-in Help is all you need to get started & build upon.  I’ll give examples of things that are very easy, once you have spent a bit of time & tried them.

1.  Conferences & data/company lists:  You download a list of company’s booths, names etc. from the website.  You copy and paste and it is a literal mess.  A couple of search and replace strings and 2000 entries are cleaned up.

2.  Copying text off of a website (particularly government websites it seems) can result in no lines between paragraphs and no line width or they are all 30-40 characters and are hard to read or put into MSWord.  Minor Search & Replace in BBEdit fix these things in seconds.

3.  1000s or tens of thousands of Emails from a single corrupted Microsoft Entrourage or Outlook single humongous file can cause you to pull your hair out.  Using BBEdit to reform the messages so they are “fixed” or importable into other email programs can be a lifesaver.  Sometimes the corruption is so bad you can reform the emails, but you can at least make most of them readable in a text editor.  I’ve done it with 120 megs of bad outlook files, and it was the only way to get data back.  BBEdit would do hundreds of thousands of “repairs” in a matter of seconds, and after 20-30 minutes most data was recoverable.

Note:  I have a problem with programs that store 40,000 emails in One Huge File.  Any single corruption and your backups had better be multiple and solidly and easily retrieved or it is a nightmare.  It also makes Time Machine backup that humongous file each time a backup is done. Yup there must be a way to offload the emails, but then I don’t use Outlook anymore.

4.  Reforming old data into a new format from a database from some obsolete applicaton that you need or someone gave you:

The simplest form might be to convert comma delimited to tab delimited or similar changes, and these are trivial to do and fast, even for huge databases inside BBEdit.

5.  Taking data from one program that doesn’t have a translator for the “new” application you want to use, like an outlining program.  Putting the old data in a new format is usually easy once you have spent a little time learning the GREP ropes.

Doing any of the jobs above on any large sort of file could take days or weeks (or worse) if the changes were done manually.

That is where BBEdit shines.