A text processing utility on
steroids
David Strom 25 Oct 2001,
Rating 4.33 (out
of 5)
Category: Text processing utility Name of
tool: Textpipe Pro v 5.5.2 Company name: DataMystic, Inc. Price: $109, free 30-day
trial URL: www.datamystic.com Windows
platforms supported: Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000 Quick
description: A powerful text processing software utility
that can manipulate just about anything and perform its
operation across a series of files quickly and accurately.
Strom-meter: ****
= Very cool, very useful
Key features:
Pros: Search and replace on various text and
non-textual characters Remove HTML and XML tags from Web
pages Add line numbers and extract e-mail addresses and
URLs from documents Reformat and clean up documents with a
wide variety of other functions and tools
Cons: Doesn't filter all XML tags
completely (Ed: incorrect) Scripting and advanced filters will take some
time to create and use properly
Description: If you run a Web site, chances are
someday you'll find yourself in the following situation. You
have just changed one of your directories and the links on all
of your pages are broken because of this change. What you
really need is a way to scan through all of your HTML files
and replace the old link with a new one.
Now, most of the Web page authoring tools can handle this
task, but a better solution is to use a product like Textpipe
Pro from the Australian company DataMystic. Think of it
as search/replace on steroids working in batch mode on whole
series of documents. It has so much power that it is hard to
describe in a simple review, but let me give you a bunch of
examples so you can get the feel for what it does.
Let's say you want to change the e-mail address in the
footer of all of your Web pages from david@strom.com to
john@newco.com. (Sure you could do this with a word processor,
but it would take some time, and you might mess up in a few
places.) Or you have a bunch of e-mail messages and want to
extract the header information to put them into a database. Or
you have a database and want to clean it up, removing almost
duplicate entries that have slight variations on postal
addresses for example. Or you have a mailing list and want to
change the capitalization of one field. Or you need to clean
up and transform a comma-separated file to move data from one
database to another. Or you download data from your mainframe
and want to convert its EBCDIC text into straight ASCII that
your PCs and workstations can better deal with. Are you
getting my drift?
If Textpipe Pro were a kitchen appliance, it would have its
own commercials on late-night TV. It slices and dices text so
quickly and with so many different options that it truly is a
utility that has 1001 uses.
First off, you have many different functions that can
operate on one or an entire directory of documents. Besides
searching for and replacing particular text, you can extract
e-mail and URLs from your documents, add line numbers and
margins and headers, do a hex dump (convert the text into
hexadecimal display), encode or decode from various MIME
formats, or convert Windows text to Macintosh text or
vice-versa. (The two operating systems have different
end-of-line characters that can vex less capable text
processors.)
Many of these things can be done with most word processors
these days. But not all -- and certainly not all of these
operations -- can be done with an ordinary word processor
across a batch of files together with a single command. That
is the power of Textpipe. And to make things even better,
there is a "trial run" portion of the software that allows you
to input some sample text and see if it gets converted the way
you expect before you process various documents. For a product
of this power, this is an essential learning tool.
One of the numerous options is the ability to create output
files that retain the date and time stamp of the original file
you are working on. That can come in handy if you have to sort
through your files to find them, or if the original timestamp
is important to you.
Textpipe is also scriptable, just in case those operations
aren't enough for you. You can write your own scripts in
Visual Basic, Jscript and several other scripting languages to
control its operations too. And there are about 100 additional
pre-written programs that can process a wide variety of
things, such as removing FrontPage or DreamWeaver tags,
extracting data from a database and converting it to an Excel
file, changing your text into Pig Latin or Valley Girl speak
or into the vernacular of the Swedish chef. Narly, man!
The software can be downloaded for a free 30-day trial and
it will nag you upon each operation to pay for it. But given
the power of this product, the near $100 price is very
reasonable. And if you have to transform text files, you will
quickly find the time saved worth the small price of the
software.
Strom-meter key: **** = Very cool, very
useful *** = Hey, not bad. One notch below very cool **
= A tad shaky to install and use but has some value. * =
Don't waste your time. Minimal real value.
David Strom is president of his own consulting firm in
Port Washington, NY. He has tested hundreds of computer
products over the past two decades working as a computer
journalist, consultant and corporate IT manager. Since 1995 he
has written a weekly series of essays on Web technologies and
marketing called Web Informant. You can send him email at mailto:david@strom.com
|