Latest Issue of the Just Great Software Newsletter

August 2010

1. Updated: PowerGREP 4.1.2
2. What's Cooking: HelpScribble, RegexBuddy, and RegexMagic
3. Tips & Tricks: Type in your own replacement text in RegexMagic

Updated: PowerGREP 4.1.2

PowerGREP 4.1.2 is now available for download. This release brings a bunch of bug fixes and improvements.

PowerGREP is now capable of searching through Excel 2007 and 2010 files (XLSX format) in the same way as files from older Excel versions (XLS format). Both formats are now converted into a textual representation that is similar to what Excel displays. This textual conversion is what PowerGREP searches through and what it shows in the results and built-in editor. If you want to search through the raw XML inside XLSX files like previous versions of PowerGREP did, select that option in the File Formats section in the Preferences.

Windows Vista and Windows 7 use a different method for supporting high resolution displays. PowerGREP now fully supports this, making PowerGREP look good when you increase the font size by more than 125% in the display settings in Windows Vista or 7.

When you click the Abort button to abort an action, the progress bar on the Results panel now counts down 10 seconds. If the action does not abort gracefully within 10 seconds, PowerGREP will forcibly terminate it. This allows you to close PowerGREP normally or start a new search if PowerGREP got stuck on certain files for any reason.

Several features on the Action panel that did not work correctly have been fixed. Action: Filtering out files did not work in version 4.1.1, causing all files to be searched. Displaying extra context after matches did not work when using sections as context. Changing the search type between "delimited" and "list" caused an internal inconsistency in the action definition which sometimes caused errors when attempting to save or execute the action.

Importing file listings now correctly handles UNC paths with spaces in the server or share name. Turning on Search Only through Files with Results in the File Selector menu now works correctly. Making replacements using backreferences via the Search toolbar on the Editor panel now works correctly.

• If you have already purchased PowerGREP 4, you can download this update for free.
• Upgrade from PowerGREP 2.x or 3.x to 4.x.
• Buy PowerGREP now.
• Complete Version History.

What's Cooking: HelpScribble, RegexBuddy, and RegexMagic

If it seems we've been putting a lot of focus on PowerGREP lately, that's because our latest major release was PowerGREP 4. Major releases bring a wide range of new features. New features always means new bugs. Since we like to fix bugs quickly, major releases tend to be followed by a stream of free minor updates for several months to get the kinks worked out.

But that doesn't mean we're ignoring our other products. We have free minor updates of HelpScribble, RegexBuddy, and RegexMagic ready to be released. New in all these releases is support for Delphi XE and C++Builder XE. HelpScribble's HelpContext property editor will integrate with the XE versions of Delphi and C++Builder like it does with previous versions. RegexBuddy and RegexMagic will add Delphi XE and C++Builder XE to the Language drop-down list on the Use panel. This will allow you to generate code snippets using the new RegularExpressions and RegularExpressionsCore units. These units are based on the PCRE regex flavor, which is already supported by RegexBuddy and RegexMagic.

Embarcadero has announced they will ship Delphi XE and C++Builder XE in September. It shouldn't take us more than a few days after that to test our products with the final XE releases and deliver the next free minor updates of HelpScribble, RegexBuddy, and RegexMagic.

Tips & Tricks: Type in your own replacement text in RegexMagic

RegexMagic can generate a replacement text along with the regular expression, based on what you tell RegexMagic you want to do with the regex matches. You can find an example in RegexMagic's help file under RegexMagic Examples, Action, Replace Fields.

If you're already familiar, you may find it quicker to type in the replacement text yourself. If you want to include backreferences to capturing groups in the replacement text, start with adding the capturing group in the Action panel. Click the New button for each group and select which fields (as defined on the Match panel) that you want to capture.

Then, set "action to take" to "replace whole regex match" and set "how to replace" to "type in a replacement text with backreferences". Now you can type in a replacement text like you would do in a text editor such as EditPad Pro. E.g. if your regex has 3 capturing groups and you want the replacement to reverse their order and delimit them by commas, type $3,$2,$1 as the replacement text.

You can indicate the replacement text flavor you're using on the Action panel. E.g. select JGsoft flavor to use the syntax used by EditPad Pro and PowerGREP. If the flavor you set on the Action panel for specifying the replacement text is different than the flavor you set on the Regex panel for generating the final regular expression and replacement text, then RegexMagic automatically converts the replacement text you provided between the two flavors. E.g. if you select Python on the Regex panel, RegexMagic converts our sample replacement text into \3,\2,\1 because Python uses backslashes to reference capturing groups in the replacement text.

Though RegexMagic is designed to generate regular expressions and replacement texts without asking you to deal with their cryptic syntax at all, you can still provide RegexMagic with prewritten regexes and replacement text and include them as part of longer regexes and replacement text or conversion to different regex and replacement flavors.

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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