Regular Expressions

General questions about using TextPad

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Andrew

Regular Expressions

Post by Andrew »

Hi there,
Being a newcomer to this great bit of software, could anyone tell me if it's possible for me to do the following.

I have a number (100s!) of web log files that have been incorrectly produced.

Example:

#Software: Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0
#Version: 1.0
#Date: 2000-03-16 07:28:11
#Fields: time c-ip cs-username cs-method ....
07:28:11 193.149.83.224 - GET / - .....
07:28:32 193.149.83.224 ......
07:28:33 193.149.83.224 - ....


I need to append the date as it appears in line 3, to the begginning of all the other lines (not starting with #).

I've produced a macro in Textpad to find the date and copy it in, but I can find no way of applying this to all the open files I have. One at once would be a bit tedious...
I know find and replace can look at all files, but I don't know how to select the date in each file and then use it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Andrew
David Kitchen

Re: Regular Expressions

Post by David Kitchen »

Do the following:

F8 or Search > Replace

and turn on regular expressions in the search dialog.

you can now use a search such as :

'\n'

which will find the end of a line, and replacing with:

'\ndate '

will place the date at the beginning of all lines.

note that you need to run a further replace to remove the date from the lines that began with # and the last line of the file, but this is effortless too :)

cheers
Howard Hansen

Re: Regular Expressions

Post by Howard Hansen »

While I have faith that almost anything can be done with liberal doses of regular expressions, I don't know how to tackle this problem.

Actually, I do know how to tackle this problem. Microsoft has a DOS utility that can do log conversion for you and it supports *.log, etc. It's called Convlog.exe and you can find a download link from this page: <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb ... /29.asp</a>

Once you've downloaded the file, just open a DOS window, move to where you downloaded convlog, then type:

convlog /?

and you'll get the help message which will tell you how to use it.

Remember, you're not the first to have to do these things!

Good Luck!

Howard Hansen
http://howard.editthispage.com
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