XReplace-32

One product that I cannot live without is a handy utility called XReplace-32. It's one of those simple concepts that makes you wonder (at least it makes me wonder) why it's not built into the operating system.

XReplace-32 is primarily used to make mass changes to files. For example, I recently made a change to a table which is duplicated in 62 files. Without XReplace-32, I would have had to manually edit each and every file to make the change. Very tedious and wasteful of my time.

By using XReplace-32 I was able to make exactly that change on all 62 files in under 5 minutes. I simply selected the files that I wanted to modify, set the text to search for and the text to replace with. Once I pressed the "Go!" menu, XReplace-32 took off and finished within a couple of minutes.

Another very cool feature is you can perform complex search and replace operations. For example, recently I wanted to remove Hitbot from each and every page on my web site (over 3,000 pages). That would have been a very time consuming task indeed without a product like XReplace-32.

At first I was not sure that XReplace-32 could handle this operation because I needed to search for strings that were different. The start and end of each Hitbot tag was the same for all of the files, but the middle was different. Using the advanced "split search" feature, I was able to tell XReplace-32 to find all of the strings beginning with a set of characters and ending with a set of characters and simply delete them (replace them with nothing). In less than thirty minutes (the time it took me to figure it out and run the program) I modified all 3,000+ files.