Anything from Just Great Software and Jan Goyvaerts, in this case - PowerGREP

[Dustydog]

[Moved this here from a less appropriate spot. Will edit for completeness later.]

A tool I can't help but pitch, since you seem interested in regular expressions. You might take a peek at PowerGREP. I had major hesitations about the price, but I wouldn't be without it now. I feel like suddenly all the information in pretty much any document type I have is entirely available to me both to extract information and to manipulate it. It has a free trial and you can access its full documentation. Incredibly powerful tool for a huge variety of tasks. If you only buy one thing from Goyvaerts, get RegexBuddy - which also includes a very nice GREP built in. But PowerGREP is...amazing. Feel free to PM me if you have some interest in that or his other tools - I shouldn't get further into it here.

(It's also - and this may sound silly - da bomb for accessing CHM and PDF help files! I'll stuff every reference I have for something into a folder and GREP the whole thing for a set of words within a specified number of words of any of another set of words - all in converted-to plain text (does this with a huge number of proprietary formats) with pointers back to the originals, and organized nicely with as many extra lines, or regex collection divisions, as you'd like - does this with html (ofc, considering the CHMs) too, and I'm starting to download parts of useful websites when I want things available to GREP from a site to additionally supplement a manual or whatever - I can GREP all these sources at once, and the output is very organized, readable, and not information overloading, even if I get a lot of results. Its sequencing features are also extremely versatile and powerful, as is its support for a wide variety of metadata - both read and write. And that doesn't get into what it's most used for, lol.)

But it's no file manager

[Enternal]

Haha yeah I've been looking at this tool for sometime. As well as their other tools like Regex Buddy/Magic. But since I'm too poor lately to buy any software, I've been using the copy of FileLocator Pro that I have and AstroGrep (free).

[Jerry]

I'm a regex veteran of 25 years and usually write most expressions myself, along with the occasional help of Goyvaerts & Levithan's excellent Regular Expressions Cookbook. Especially, because I've done a great deal of PERL scripting in the past. (Naturally, I would have preferred that XYplorer use embedded extended PERL instead of its own language, but that's all I'll say about that.) But tools like RegexBuddy are helpful and great for beginners. I've personally used the free edition of Regex Match Tracer for really pesky situations.

I've taken a look at PowerGrep and will keep that in mind for complex document searching. But most of the time, I've found XYplorer's regex content searching sufficient. I also search through text files with Gnu Emacs.

[Dustydog]

I'm a regex veteran of 25 years and usually write most expressions myself, along with the occasional help of Goyvaerts & Levithan's excellent Regular Expressions Cookbook. Especially, because I've done a great deal of PERL scripting in the past. (Naturally, I would have preferred that XYplorer use embedded extended PERL instead of its own language, but that's all I'll say about that.) But tools like RegexBuddy are helpful and great for beginners. I've personally used the free edition of Regex Match Tracer for really pesky situations.

I've taken a look at PowerGrep and will keep that in mind for complex document searching. But most of the time, I've found XYplorer's regex content searching sufficient. I also search through text files with Gnu Emacs.

I was a regex beginner this year, thus my fondness for RegexBuddy - which I've been using less and less lately for most things - but for building a truly...extravagant regex with perhaps a DEFINE group at the top, heh, can't beat it. And when I get something wrong, it's fast, versatile, clear, and I end up with a good understanding of just what went on under the hood. It's also nice, and this may seem a bit daft, to be able to combine a DEFINE group, say, with Ruby subroutine calls (which I find very straightforward). The JGSoft regex flavor, as used by PowerGREP or the little tool in RegexBuddy, allow you to pick and choose syntax from multiple flavors at once, which though it may seem like incredibly bad practice, has been a good way for me to learn the differences in behavior and syntax as I'm working my way through material drawn from various flavors. I felt that for what I got when I bought it for the price of an average textbook, it was an excellent value.

PowerGREP's ability to do really heavy lifting with any type of unorganized data, including a huge variety of de-cluttered proprietary formats is just unbeatable - and it supports writing to metadata (and associated renaming) in an amazing number of formats as well - which can only improve as there was a major release not too long ago. It's clear when you're pulling out data, and it's extremely powerful in manipulating massive amounts quickly all in a database-console like context.

I'm jealous of your PERL wisdom, and being so fond of regexes, I've been tempted to learn it lately as its integration and flexibility seem unbeatable for building on my, I think, quite good expertise with them at this point, even if my goals with it were very modest in scope. Think I'm going to PM you as I could use some advice. Feel free to ignore me if you lack the time

Emacs...it's just beyond what I want to learn at this point in my life.

[highend]

There is a thread dedicated to regex (help) here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6778