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Especially big file manipulation may require a sorting option
'delete all lines with double occurece of the same sorting argument'
as an extension of
'delte double lines'.

Example: Task: From this tabel a list of 'touched' countries shall be derivated
Activating this option while sorting columns 9 ... will result in: Searchis this forum I found some questions and suggestions concerning sorting end extraction that will become obsolet with this extension.

But then the question arises: which of the lines with the doubled (tripled/quadrupled/...) sort keys is to be kept?


If you only want to find a list of (unique) country names:

select the column with the country names (block select), copy it into a new file, do a sort with deletion of duplicate lines.

The algorithm will keep the first entry maybe as a result of a previous sorting. This list is only thought to be an example. There are lots of more redundancies that might be valuable and should remain in the file.

I suspect all this can be achieved via regualr expression. I'm sure if you post your requirement in that forum, one of the regex gurus will give you the answer.

TextPad's regular expression recogniser doesn't allow back-references (such as \1) that refer back over a newline. So, within a TextPad regular expression, you can't refer back to text on a previous line that matched a subexpression of the same regular expression.

But you can do it with WildEdit (http://www.textpad.com/products/wildedit/), which uses a far more powerful regex recogniser. Repeatedly run this replacement:

Find what: ([^ ]+ +)(.+)\r?\n[^ ]+ +\2
Replace with: $1$2

[X] Regular expression
[X] Replacement format

Options
[X] '.' does not match a newline character

Or, in WildEdit, run this just once:

Find what: ([^ ]+ +)(.+)(\r?\n[^ ]+ +\2)+
Replace with: $1$2

[X] Regular expression
[X] Replacement format

Options
[X] '.' does not match a newline character