TextPipe's search and replace features

All search and replaces can be single or multi-line, and can include binary characters. Searches can be performed with equal ease in text or binary files.

TextPipe displays the length of search and replace strings -- especially useful for text replacement in binary files where the replacements must have identical length to the found text. Special characters and common patterns can be inserted via a context menu. All changes are tracked via an audit log.

TextPipe provides six different methods of performing search and replace in text or binary strings.

• Exact text - Find the text exactly as it is shown..
• Text or binary patterns, using e-grep and perl-like regular expressions. Patterns allow optional text, repeating text and character groups satisfying complex criteria to be found and replaced. TextPipe allows up to 36 bracketed sub-expressions (all other utilities have a maximum of 10).
• Sounds-like matching (soundex). Soundex matching is useful for data cleansing where it can be used to find miss-spellings of words like 'Delhee' 'Delli' 'Deli' etc and replace them with 'Delhi'
• Edit distance matching (determine if two strings are within a threshold of 'edits' - a number of character swaps, inserts or deletes). This matching is the optimal way to cope with data-entry errors made by call-centre staff etc, as it handles the most common typing mistakes - character swaps, missing characters and extra characters.
• Word-style patterns. TextPipe can use the same wildcards style as Microsoft Word
• Brief-style patterns. TextPipe can use the same wildcards style as the popular Brief editor
• EasyPatterns - a user friendly pattern matching language
• Unicode exact matching
• Unicode pattern matching.

TextPipe also supports search/replace lists from Excel, Tab or CSV-delimited formats. They can either be imported into TextPipe once, maintained within TextPipe, or dynamically from the external file on demand.

The following options can also be used with search and replace:

• Case sensitive find - Either find the text capitalized exactly as provided, or find it with any capitalization.
• Whole words only - Only identify a match where the find text is a complete word and not part of another word eg find 'the' in 'THE quick brown fox' but not in 'There are their friends'.
• Case sensitive replace - TextPipe looks at the case of the matching string, and if it is all upper case or all lowercase or mixed case it will change the case of the replacement string to match it. This is very handy for electronic text processing where you want the replacement strings case to match the found texts case.
• Replace first only - only replace the first found match. Very useful if you know that the search string will only be found once, or that you only want to replace the first occurrence. Faster too!
• Prompt on replace - prompt the user for each replacement. TextPipe shows the context text surrounding the searched on text. The user can choose to Replace or skip individual occurrences, or to replace or skip the rest of file, the rest of the job (all files) or the rest of the selection (a selection is a subset of the text such as a line or column range, a CSV or tab-delimited field, a previous search result etc).
• Skip prompt if identical - if the replacement is the same as the found text, don't bother prompting. This can be a handy time-saver for large web sites.
• Extract matches - Only matching text is output, all other text is discarded. This is very handy for extracting data from web pages.

TextPipe also provides a wizard to build filters to Edit/Replace/Remove/Append to

• Text inside an HTML tag - e.g. to edit the ALT property of images
• Text between a pair of HTML tag - edit a hyperlink's text
• Text between any tags - edit text between any two points

Custom patterns can also be inserted via the context menu. They are defined in a text file that can be customized by the user.