How to manually search & replace item in catalog.dat file?

[aliteralmind]

I have the following catalog category:

Code: Select all

Category name: "Django auth tutorial"
Item1: 
- Caption: "Copy '/../django_auth_lifecycle/'"
- Location: ':: copytext "/home/jeffy/django_files/django_auth_lifecycle/"'
Item2: 
- Caption: "Copy 'Q:\..\django_auth_lifecycle\'"
- Location: ':: copytext "Q:\django_files\django_auth_lifecycle\"'

My goal is to save this as a catalog file (django_project_category.dat), and use it as a template, which I would then import into my "All Django projects" catalog as a new category. For each project, I want to replace "Django auth tutorial" with "New Django project name", and "django_auth_lifecycle" with "new_project_name". In reality, this will have more than just two items, so manually changing each item's description and location, for each project, is pretty laborious.

It'd be nice to have a search and replace feature for categories, but that seems like a moderately large request. So instead, is it possible to *manually* make these replacements in a hex editor? I'm not familiar with editing binary files. I just tried search and replace in HxD, but this:



resulted in this:



and this:



resulted in this:



(Both give me a "this operation changes the file size" warning, which I don't know if it's relevant.)

Am I on the right path here?

[aliteralmind]

(There doesn't seem to be a scripting solution.)

[admin]

Forget it, you cannot successfully edit this file. It's a complex binary format not made for human minds.

But there is also good news: I plan to convert catalog.dat (and all other *.dat files) to the standard INI format. Totally brain-friendly and easy to edit.

[aliteralmind]

Good news

[Enternal]

Haha that is good news! Still remembered the time when I had to replace all my links in it because I changed the location of my root folder. Manually changing all thos links was pretty fun