Find and replace

[jon112981]

In windows I have a large text file that I need to find and replace all characters in it. Now normally in notepad this is very easy> ctrl+h and just type the two fields. I can do it this way except it will take on average about 5 days to do the finding and replacing for each character I want (20 minutes per day of data and 11 months of data). What I seemed to realize is that with the replace command (using windows nt or 2k) it manually updates the display on the screen for each replace it does when I hit replace all. Is there a way to get this to not update the display until the end. I don't care what it looks like in the middle. I just want it to replace the characters as quickly as possible.

[howste]

MS Word doesn't update the display every time it replaces characters. Have you tried using it?

[jon112981]

Hmmm might work. With my experiences word tends to be slower than notepad and more resource intensive but I'll give it a shot.

*** Edit ***
And so it works MUCH faster. I have been having slight problems with word however and VERY long documents(over 200 pages) sometimes it doesn't seem to like it, but hey if this works I ain't gonna knock it. Thanks for the idea.

[howste]

You're welcome. Post back and let us know how it turns out.

[crouse]

www.notetab.com

does a search and replace very quickly and counts the number of times it replaces x with y ...... file size is limited only by the amount of ram in your machine. FREE download.

HTH's


EDIT...... on a side note.... this is one of the VERY few windows programs I ever BOUGHT the PRO version of. I highly recommend it to anyone who uses windows. The closest Linux counterpart is BlueFish. Try it, you'll like it.....especially if you like the speed of notepad. NoteTab is FAST

[jon112981]

Nice program, has trouble with really big files because my computer sucks but it's good. Okay this is going to sound really lame and I know that I should know this. In word/notepad/notetab/whatever, is there a way to replace a character, say a comma with a tab. I seem to remember a LONG time ago there was an article in PC magazine on cleaning up email, using find and replace to get rid of annoying spaces, returns etc. and there was a character string that represented each of them. Anyone know what those are?

[Eraserhead]

In Word, if you go to Edit > Find or Replace and click the "More" button and click "Special, you'll get a menu of special options where you can find and replace non-alphanumeric characters

[jon112981]

Ummm can it be done in textpad with a string? I don't really have the resources to open this file in word.

***EDIT***
Found it in word. Apparantly Word Stores it as ^t. I ended up just using that as it was not too slow. Thanks again guys. You never let me down.