Lex Trotman wrote:
Why do people still do data wrangling in text this many years after the invention of the day-tar base. (rhetorical question ;-)
I often need to wrangle day-tar with a text editor to simplify migrating it from some truly horrid Microsoft Access pile to something less horrid, at least when it's only going to be a one-off migration and scripting it would take longer, but that aside...
I quite often grab chunks of text from such sources as XML files, SQL schemas, CSV nastiness, visually-impenetrable legacy code etc. and use Geany to strip them back to useful field names that I can then drop into code classes, HTML forms, etc. using a mix of regex and piped commands. I used to do that sort of thing with a variety of sed, awk and python scripting but generally find I can do it all much faster directly in Geany these days (especially with the most frequently used transforms bound to a couple of keystrokes).
[...]
In fact, the predominant Scintilla- based editor on Windows, Notepad++, has a nifty plugin called TextFX that does thus plus dozens of other really nice text transforms because they can be so handy. Perhaps this plugin can one day become the Geany equivalent :)
Maybe Emil could take that as a challenge, at least he knows where to look for ideas :) and this plugin could be the start of an incremental implementation.
I was hoping so, or at least it might serve as a good base for the next hacker :)