reflections on jrepl and findrepl

[Sponge Belly]

Dear Dave and Aacini,

First of all, let me say that jrepl and findrepl are excellent programs. Some may grumble that they are JavaScript wrapped in Batch, but I don’t think that’s a valid criticism because it would be simply impossible to write a program in “pure Batch” (whatever that is) that would have the same functionality as jrepl and findrepl.

However, I am puzzled as to why there are two programs that do more or less the same thing. May I be so bold as to suggest that you work together, merge your code, and create a new, unified find-and-replace tool? I’ll help with the documentation. I’m good at picking lint out of sentences.

Lastly, my one gripe with your tools is that they presuppose the user is an expert in regular expressions. It would be a simple thin for clever chaps such as yourselves to include shorthands for commonly-performed tasks such as: trim trailing whitespace; merge multiple blank lines; case conversions; Win to Unix line endings; etc.

Just my two cents!

- SB

[Squashman]

Dave has put several examples for common usage in his forum threads.

[foxidrive]

FWIW they are Jscript, which is a different animal to Javascript, and we would have just loved to have all that functionality back in the '90s

to include shorthands for commonly-performed tasks such as: trim trailing whitespace; merge multiple blank lines; case conversions; Win to Unix line endings; etc.

This could well be a useful addition.

As for having two and more tools written by different people merged into one tool: collaboration to create a unified tool may well remove much of the enjoyment in creating and refining the tools, as a strict layer of updating and consulting and agreement would be required to create a unified tool.

My reflection is that it's great to have such generous and talented guys write tools for the scripting community, and having such robust methods to solve tasks in a native way to Windows, is just brilliant.

There's not as much need to recall all the various foibles and methods to get around the poison characters, and the solution to so many tasks is much more straight forward.

Kudos to you guys.