String-O-Matic

Because we have to worry about strings every day, all day long...

Current download link: stringomatic.zip - updated 2002.10.27

About String-O-Matic

The String-O-Matic Prehistory

String-O-Matic was born from some scripts Eric Phelps wrote a couple of years ago, scripts which popped up an input box, manipulated a string, then popped it back out.

I found them useful, but not convenient enough - I didn't want to have to keep finding and running scripts here and there.  Further inspired by ideas I saw in the scripting newsgroups, I sat down and created a window with a few buttons to do standard manipulation tasks.

This grew in the writing; I picked up ideas from many places, including most recently a lot of layout and some extra functionality from the Script-O-Matic.  The current name was quite obviously inpired by it; I had tried a few different names and none were the correct combination of short, descriptive, and appropriate for use in the presence of children.  When I saw Script-O-Matic, I knew that I had found the answer.

Why: Because it's all about strings

If you deal with online correspondence, newsgroups, or writing, you spend a bunch of time dinking around with strings every day. The problems can be helped significantly by tools such as OE QuoteFix, but they are still there for all sorts of things.

Take URLs: You get broken in-email/news urls, hashed-up Google URLs their own mothers wouldn't recognize, obsolete MSKB URLs. You get other strings/fragments - text from email you want to unquote, ROT-13 text you want to read, text you want to ROT-13 on purpose, "bare" MSKB and other article IDs, etc.

What String-O-Matic Does

String-O-Matic was written to make cleaning and reconstructing these little "pocket lint of life" problems easy. It can clean up text fragments to make them into what you need. In the case of URL reconstruction, you don't even need to be careful - you grab a text chunk that contains a broken URL or "noisy" MSKB article number (with "/" and '.asp" embedded) and it cleans it for you the right way.

How To Use It

  1. String-O-Matic is an HTML application; if you got it as a .txt file or embedded in a zip archive, just save it as a file ending with ".hta".  I suggest "stringomatic.hta".
  2. Double-click and run it.
  3. Drag munged-up text into the "input" window. You can paste, you can select and drag from IE or Outlook Express, you can even drag a message from its icon in OE.
  4. Select a button that does what you want. Almost all buttons have a "tooltip" when you pause over them explaining what they do.

Some highlights:

Browse: browses to a URL in the output window

HTTP-X: takes a text chunk from email starting somewhere before "http://" and removes the ">" characters, joins the lines, then extracts the URL by removing any preceding text. Lets you do a really sloppy drag-drop with no worries.

Strip: Yanks all the ">" characters on the left side of lines of text

Join, Spaced Join: Joins any lines in the window

Swap: swaps input and output windows so you can do multiple steps.

Google: Experimental; takes the pasted text, tries to remove any extra stuff which isn't need for browsing to the URL.

MSKB: Creates a new-style URL from a pasted MSKB URL or URL fragment. As long as you have the actual article digits in the string, you're good to go.

Oh, yeah, if you have to deal with QP text, ASCII/Hex conversion, translating hex numbers into decimal, evaluating complex mathematical expressions, or scripting/testing script fragments on the fly, this will do that as well - but you may need to explore to see WHAT it will do...