In my job, I regularly have to manipulate, and extract data from, large xml files and large sql queries. Sometimes its a “remove first 10 chars from 100 lines” situation, or a “find all the lines that don’t contain any of these strings,” or just I want to do a find and replace on a string that involves newline characters.

I slowly learned what programs let you find and replace based on tabs, newline characters etc, and which didn’t. I didn’t have a one-stop shop for such things.

One day, the scale of what I had to do was so big that it was quicker to make a program to do it than to do it manually. I designed it to be easily extendable, so that I could easily add other functions to it, and StringFuncs was born.

Currently, it incorporates 45 seperate functions – some of them are commonplace (eg Find), others are common but with a twist (Find and Replace with multiline input, Find and Replace in files), and others are obscure enough that you’d likely never think of them until you need them (given two sets of strings, remove all strings that aren’t in both lists, or remove all strings that are in both lists).

Its a small exe written in C#, and requiring .NET 2.0 to run. Its saved my ass on several occasions, and has helpful little tooltips that explain every function. You can download it here, I hope it proves useful!