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Have exausted the help and searched here and the answer to the following appears to be "no" but would like to be sure before I abandon Wildedit.

Fairly comfortable with regular expression replacements, but have the need to run a process on a directory with multiple expressions that remain the same

i.e.;

replace all "xxx" with "xyxyxy"

replace all "zzz" with "zzzzzz"

replace all "updated xx/xx/xxxx" with "updated <today's date>"

questions;

Is there any way to import complex regular expressions into wildedit other than cut and paste? (command line, etc)

Is there any way to run multiple replacements such as the above either in a single pass or an automatic series of passes?

(Seems like the above would be a common need for anyone who regularly needed Wildedit.)

Thanks in advance,
Beverly Howard

Beyond one use, I haven't touched WildEdit but I suspect that you can use Autoit or MacroScheduler (do a search on the boards for it) and basically write a script that will fire off WE with appropriate contents. Bob or ... (my mind is failing me) could probably provide better insight on whether it'd work or not.

I think you are correct talleyrand

Macro Scheduler can automate anything that you can type or use mouse movements for. The macros are editable. I frequentlyuse it to automate tasks in TextPad. I sometimes use it to call TextPad's own macros. It works with all Windows programs and allows you to integrate data across them automatically. I have not used it with WildEdit but am sure it will work OK.

In this case, if you wanted to use Macro Scheduler, then you could make one or more text files in TextPad, containing the Search/Replace strings. You could open WildEdit, read the external file(s) for the Search/Replace strings, and have it pasted into WildEdit and process that string. When done, read the external file for the next S/R string and repeat until all of the strings have been done. You can create conditional loops that will repeat until some condition exists. You can create pauses, ask for user inputs, send status messages, create logs, etc.

Once this was set up, you could just change the contents of the S/R files to repeat the same routine for other RegEx expressions.

Thanks for the responses... exactly what I needed to know (that Wildedit is limited to one replacement at a time)

Appreciate the macro suggestions.

fwiw, Wildedit is pretty impressive for dealing with a directory full of files... the need that prompted the post relates to just under 350 files, takes three passes to doctor all files and one dos command to rename them.

Thanks again,
Beverly Howard