Category: Text processing utility
Name of tool: Textpipe Pro v 5.5.2
Company name: Crystal Software, Inc.
Price: $109, free 30-day trial
URL: www.crystalsoftware.com.au
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
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
Crystal Software. 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 david@strom.com.
