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Latest Issue of the
Just Great Software Newsletter

January 2010

Contents

1. Updated: RegexMagic 1.0.4

2. Tips & Tricks: Outlining Text Files with Leading Dots

Updated: RegexMagic 1.0.4

Released last year, RegexMagic is the latest product from Just Great Software. Its purpose is to make it easier to create regular expressions. While it serves the same purpose as RegexBuddy, its approach is totally different. As such, RegexMagic will certainly not replace RegexBuddy. Rather, it aims to serve the need of a different group of people. Some will wish to use both RegexBuddy and RegexMagic at the same time. Please visit RegexMagic's web site at http://www.regexmagic.com to learn more about RegexMagic and to download a free evaluation version.

RegexMagic 1.0.4 is now available for download. This version brings several minor fixes and improvements. If the technical explanations below about the regular expressions generated by RegexMagic sound pretty complicated to you, then RegexMagic may be just the product that you need to create your own regular expressions. Use the Match and Action panels in RegexMagic to specify what you want, and let RegexMagic (and its developer) worry about the proper regular expression syntax.

The contents of the Match panel are now rearranged correctly when making changes that require the panel to be rearranged even when the contents of the panel have been scrolled down. Loading a library and then starting with a new library and adding a formula no longer triggers access violation errors. Menu and toolbar icons now appear correctly on Windows 98, ME, and 2000.

On the Action panel, if you specify one field to be replaced, RegexMagic automatically adds capturing groups before and after that field to be able to reinsert the text before and after the field into the replacement text. If you also create a capturing group that spans multiple fields including the field you want to replace, that results in overlapping capturing groups. That caused an error in RegexMagic 1.0.3 and earlier because regular expressions don't support overlapping capturing groups. Now, RegexMagic detects this situation and will use multiple capturing groups, if needed, to capture the parts of the regex before and after the field that you want to replace.

Several fixes were made to generating regular expressions that include the "regular expression" pattern. This pattern allows you to insert an arbitrary regular expression into your RegexMagic formula. If you repeat a field using this pattern, RegexMagic now properly groups the pattern's regular expression so it is properly repeated as a whole. If the regular expression has capturing groups, RegexMagic now takes those groups into account when determining the numbers for the capturing groups on the Action panel. Backreferences in the pattern's regular expression are now also adjusted to the new numbers of the capturing groups in the final regular expression.

Tips & Tricks: Outlining Text Files with Leading Dots

A prospective customer asked if EditPad Pro had the ability to create an outline of text files like another editor he had used before. In that Editor, putting a dot (which normally goes at the end of a sentence) at the start of a line turned that line into a heading. Two dots at the start of a line creates a second-level heading. Up to six dots can be used in that editor for six levels of headings. The editor can show a tree with the headings in a sidebar. Text in the actual file can be folded under its headings.

That sounds exactly like what EditPad Pro's system of file navigation schemes is designed for. At http://www.editpadpro.com/fns.html you can learn more about this system. So I created a file navigation scheme that builds an outline based on the number of dots at the start of each line, with no limit to the nesting level. To use this file navigation scheme, select Options, Configure File Types in EditPad's menu. Select the file type you want to outline in the list. To outline .txt files, choose Text Document. On the Syntax & Navigation tab, click the Download button under the drop-down list with file navigation schemes. Find the "outline using leading dots" scheme in the list and click the Install button. Then click Close. Installed schemes are not automatically put to use. To use it, select "outline using leading dots" in the file type configuration screen after closing the download screen. Turn on the "add automatic folding points from the file navigation scheme" option and click OK.

Now, whenever you start a line with one or more dots, that line becomes a foldable heading. If you click the square with the minus symbol in it, all text up to the next heading at the same level is hidden. Temporarily hiding parts of the file you're not working with makes it easier to keep an overview of the file's structure. To work the other way around, select Fold All in the Fold menu. Then you can expand the headings you want to edit.

To get the tree view in a sidebar, simply open the File Navigator via the View menu. Click on a heading in the File Navigator to scroll the file to make it visible. Shift+Click on a heading to select the heading plus all the text up to the next heading at the same level.

The screen shot at http://www.editpadpro.com/screens/outlineleadingdots.png shows the result.

That's it for this month. Thank you for using our software, and see you next month!

Kind regards,

Jan Goyvaerts

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