TextCrawler is a lifesaver

HaveAByte was recently was granted technical responsibilities for advance-tapes.com / advancecollege.org - a website with legal case summaries going back to 1992, developed by the late Professor Steven R. Finz and recently taken under the wing of Pincus Legal Education, a client of HaveAByte.  I wouldn't be surprised if the website goes back nearly that far as well.  It's a pretty amazing website for those interested in these legal case summaries, there are thousands of cases posted.  If you saved every page on the site to your PC, there would be over 6000 files.  I also truly love the design - I'm a real minimalist.  :)

Of course, in this modern age, we use databases to store smaller bits of information, use shared include files (to share content across pages), and then would build the case summary pages dynamically with code pulling the cases from a database.  This entire site could potentially be around 50 actual source pages, and easy to update.  However, amazingly, it is actually 6000 unique HTML files due to how far back it dates.  Looking at the site, however, you'd never know this - the menu footer and various other common elements are virtually identical across all 6000+ pages, as it was very well constructed.

It's a bit like going back in time to when everything was simply an HTML page and edited manually, but when you add the modern expectations that clients have which have evolved over time, it presents an interesting challenge to update.

Enter TextCrawler developed by Digital Volcano in the UK.

This amazing, free little application has made maintaining this site a lot easier.  From their website:

TextCrawler is a fantastic tool for anyone who works with text files. This cool utility enables you to instantly find and replace words and phrases across multiple files and folders.  It utilises a powerful Regular Expression engine to enable you to create sophisticated searches, perform batch operations, extract text from files and more. It is fast and easy to use, and as powerful as you need it to be.

Some features:

• • Find and Replace across files
  • Fast searching, even on large files.
  • Simple to use interface
  • Flexible search parameters
  • Text Extractor - rip text into a new file
  • Search and replace using Regular Expressions. Create sophisticated searches.
  • Regular Expression test tool
  • Regular Expression library - Save your searches.
  • Create backup files
  • Highlighted search results
  • Export Results
  • Batch find and replace operations

TextCrawler is freeware, but any donations towards future development are gratefully received. If in the future a pay-for version of Textcrawler is released all contributors will receive a full licence!  (I just donated 10 GBP.)

My favorite part of this application is the real-time preview of exactly what your replacement is going to replace.  In the case of regular expressions, it's easy sometimes to accidentally write a "greedy" expression that replaces more than it should, which in this case would be devastating, forcing a restoration from backup.  Essentially this application has allowed me to fulfill the requests of the client nearly as well as if the site was constructed on a modern database or CMS platform.  I look forward to rebuilding this site using modern techniques when and if it makes sense to do so, but for now, I'm glad I have this little application to help ease the pain a bit.  The best things in life are indeed free!