File Lists

The Files to Process tab of the main TextPipe window allows you to configure the list of files to be processed. This list is only used if the Input Filter is set to process files.

Note: This screen shot shows an older version of TextPipe where Add=Include and Subtract=Exclude.

The columns widths can be resized by dragging the column separator in the header.

Filename or Folder Name Column
The Filename column lists both individual filenames and wildcard specifications for files to be matched. e.g. c:\windows\*.ini will match all files with an extension of .ini in the c:\windows folder. If the filename doesn't contain wildcards (* or ?), then double clicking it or clicking the [View] button when the row is selected will open the file in its associated application. Single clicking the filename after it has been selected allows it to be edited, and also shows an ellipsis button, which when clicked, allows you to browse for files.

Multiple file specifications can be separated with a semi-colon e.g.

c:\INetPub\*.htm;*.txt;*.asp
Clicking on the Filename column heading sorts the file list. Double clicking on a row in the file list opens the file or folder.

• Note - TextPipe allows files to be specified more than once. This can be useful when a file needs to be appended multiple times.
• Note 2 - Because of its use in separating filespecs, filenames in the grid cannot contain a semicolon (;). You can workaround this by using a filespec that replaces the ; with a ? character.
• Note 3 - both the * (match a group of characters) and ? (match a single character) wildcards are supported.

Action Column
The setting in the Action column determines whether TextPipe adds this file specification to the list or removes files that match it from the list. For example (as above), if the file list contained an entry to include *.txt in all subfolders, and below it an entry to Exclude all entries matching 'Readme.txt' from all subfolders, then TextPipe will look at the file list it has gathered so far, and remove all matching entries eg.

Sample File List After 'Include *.txt in all subfolders'

d:\test.txt
d:\Readme.txt
d:\winnt\readme.txt
d:\winnt\modemDet.txt
d:\winnt\setuplog.txt
Sample File List After 'Exclude Readme.txt in all subfolders'

d:\test.txt
d:\winnt\modemDet.txt
d:\winnt\setuplog.txt
Exclude entries are shown in Red. The Action column also provides the value Ignore which may be used to temporarily ignore any entry in the list.

Right click - Copy to Trial Input
Right clicking on a file shows a menu - allowing you to copy the selected file into the Trial Input area. If the file you click on has wildcards then TextPipe will pick the first file that matches the wildcards. Note that TextPipe ignores the settings of the Subfolders and Action columns.

Analyse
Attempts to detect the file encoding. Encodings detected include:

Unicode encoding UTF-32BE
Unicode encoding UTF-32LE
Unicode encoding UTF-16BE
Unicode encoding UTF-16LE
Unicode encoding UTF-16BE XML
Unicode encoding UTF-16LE XML
Unicode encoding UTF-8 XML
Unicode encoding UTF-8
EBCDIC XML
Unicode UTF-32BE
Unicode UTF-32LE
Unicode UTF-16BE
Unicode UTF-16LE
Unknown - ASCII or ANSI

Hex Dump
Displays a hex dump of the first 200 characters of the file. This is very handy for determining the file format.

Add Folder
Clicking the [Add folder] button displays a browse folder dialog, which lets you select a folder to be processed. When the folder is added, by default, '*.*' is appended to the folder name to indicate that all files in the folder will be processed. The new row containing the added folder defaults its Subfolder and Action columns from the row above.

Insert Row
Inserts a blank new row below the current row.

Copy Row
Inserts a new row below the current row that is an exact copy of the current row.

View
If the selected row's filename doesn't contain wildcards (* or ?), then double clicking it or clicking the [View] button when the row is selected will open the file in its associated application.

New Group
Adds a new file group below the current row. A file group limits the entries affected by Exclude entries. Exclude entries only act on files previously added within the current group, rather than affecting all files added so far.

Groups must have a colon ':' as the first character of their name, but the name is otherwise unrestricted.

Open File List
TextPipe can read the file list from a file. This means that you can easily create a list of files to process for various tasks, and open it when required rather than go through the laborious task of adding the files to the list each time.

The file consists of a single file specification per line eg.

c:\my documents\*.txt
c:\bp\*.pas
d:\job_ads\*.*
To open a file list, click on the open icon on the files tab. An open dialog box appears. Select one or more files to open and click on the Ok button.

Save File List
The currently displayed file list can be saved to a file by clicking on the Save icon on the Files tab. A save dialog appears and an existing filename can be selected or a new one specified.

Remove
To delete one or more entries in the list, select them and and press [Delete] or click [Remove].

Remove All
To remove all entries, click [Remove All]. You must confirm this action.

Drag and Drop
Drag and drop files from Windows Explorer either onto TextPipe's main window or onto its icon (the Files tab does not have to be visible).

Command Line
Provide the names of the files you wish to process on the command line, either by name (using wildcards) or in a list file. A file list can be opened on the command line by using the /F=<filename> option.