Regex Renegade
Posted on 2008-08-03 (Updated on 2019-01-23)
Being a web guy in a small government organization, I have limited amounts of time to put towards each page. The amount of time I put into a page directly effects how practical it is to create that page; it also effects how much time I have for the next page. The time I take to put up one page has a kind of cascade effect on how much the County can put online. With that taken under consideration, I do not take lightly any technique that saves me time. PsPad, my text editor, has earned a warm place in my heart because of just that: it's full of little time-saving functions that make my life easier.
One of these time-saving functions is an advanced search and replace feature that uses regular expressions (or regex for short). RexEx serves a very specific purpose: it matches patterns in text. Using search and replace with RegEx can make HTML extremely short work, and allow you to convert huge documents into HTML with a couple finely-tuned regular expressions. Who knows, perhaps using this ultra search and replace could even save the day?
This is one way to speed yourself up as a web guy, without growing extra arms or sacrificing sleep. I think I'll post a couple more of these "productivity boosts" a bit later, and hopefully it will help someone out there keep up.
Tags: html