November 17th, 1999

[9:00 AM] Sweeping Up Your Dirty Text Just Got Easier
by Staff

Blue Line Studios has released the final version of their text manipulating software, TextBroom. TextBroom 1.2.3 allows users to "cleanup" text files by searching for, and replacing, annoying strings of text. According to Blue Line Studios:

TextBroom is a utility that handles nightmarish text files. Suppose you receive a list containing 3,796 e-mail address lines and you suspect it to contain duplicate entries. TextBroom lets you remove all duplicate lines easily with just one click. Or perhaps you have just saved a spreadsheet from within Excel "As plain text"; the resulting document now contains no less than ten thousand tabs; 10, 12, 17, 31, etc. tabs in a row. TextBroom can replace the superfluous tabulators with just a single one, or with the character you specify.

Other features include the smart finding and replacing of "funny" number separators. For example, TextBroom can replace the apostrophe within "10'000", while the string "you're", also containing an apostrophe, will not be changed. TextBroom also features the automatic removing and adding of space characters where required; the removing of annoying e-mail quotes, as well as smart upper/lower case functions like word caps, sentence caps, and the fixing of two-letter caps.

Also very valuable is the picking of words or lines containing certain characters. Perhaps you have a large text file with e-mail addresses littered everywhere; just specify "@" as the search character and TextBroom will dutifully collect all the e-mail addresses found in the text.

TextBroom is available as shareware for US$15, and a time limited demonstration version is available from the Blue Line Studios. For more information, you can visit the Blue Line Studios web site.

Blue Line Studios