Text file Filter and Formatter

Version 2.12

This product can be used to filter or process text files, to create new files with different information or formats. It can also extract content from XML, PDF, or HTML and perform some level of analysis. More advanced organisation and search capabilities are also included. You can download the demo verson of the program here, while the user guide describes the product features in detail and their usefulness for text analysis/formatting.

This page describes a text file processing program that can filter or format text-based content. The application now includes more advanced organiser and search capabilities, as well as the formatting and filtering ones. For text processing itself, it can read Text or XML files and can apply a sequence of operations on the text to transform it into a different format or structure. This can also involve removing content, where a unique feature is probably the ability to generate ordered lists of words from files of arbitrary text. The program can also extract the contents of PDF or HTML files, to process just the text content. It can also perform some of the more common formatting operations. The key features are as follows:

1. Re-structure the text based on sequences of filtering options.
2. Re-format text files for different specifications (line width, spacing, indentation, character replacement, upper/lower case, for example).
3. Filter text to remove/replace specified words or tokens.
4. Remove/keep specific words or lines.
5. Line truncation before or after specified characters.
6. Extract only the content of XML files, or re-format to use tag names as well.
7. Limited conversion back to XML format.
8. Extract the text content of HTML or PDF files.
9. Generate ordered lists of words from re-structured text.
   
10. A toolbar for quick access to some of the formatting options, including a processing status field.
11. Basic XPath-style search operations, with wildcards.
12. Selection through search of specific areas of text, to be reformatted separate to the whole document.
13. A manual panel that allows you to process the text at an individual row, column or cell level. This is different to processing a whole document and allows you easy access to the parts that are more difficult to define.
14. An analysis panel that allows you to perform some level of analysis / data mining over the text. This is configurable and you can save the results to a file.
15. A document organiser can be used to organise or group your documents based on their content.
16. Undo / redo options for the last 5 operations.

Product Details

The product consists of three different panels that perform different kinds of operations. Two of the panels can filter or format the text and update the result, while the third panel can perform a limited amount of analysis over the text. The panels in the GUI are as follows:

1. The General panel allows for general filtering operations over the whole text file. This is also the panel provided in the demo version.
2. The Manual panel allows the user to manually specify certain cells or areas to filter or remove.
3. The Analysis panel can perform some statistical analysis over the raw or filtered text.

General Panel

This panel can perform filtering and formatting processes over the whole text document and is shown below. You specify a number of filtering/formatting options that are to be performed in sequence and then run them to change the text. This panel consists of a left-hand side with the filtering/formatting options and a right-hand side that shows the document after it has been changed. You can reformat the whole document, or select specific sections that will be reformatted by themselves.

Manual Panel

The General panel allows you to choose a sequence of operations that are automatically applied to the whole document, or document sections. The Manual filtering panel provides additional functionality through a grid or tabular format that allows you to select specific columns and rows to delete or format. This means that you can more easily access columns or single words in the middle of lines that a general line format could not easily change. The grid table also provides a popup menu with additional formatting options. So with the grid format you can:

• Select certain (whole or partial) columns or rows of data to remove, while keeping the rest of the text.
• Insert new columns of text at specific positions, or alter the existing text in these cells with additional text.
• Save finally formatted text with a user-specified separator between the cell words, such as for a CSV file.
• Simply remove certain rows of text from the document before processing.

A graphic of the Manual panel is shown below:

Analysis Panel

The product also comes with a panel that can provide a limited amount of analysis of what the newly formatted text represents. The analysis essentially performs some statistical operations on the text words, comparing them to determine the most popular groupings. This analysis includes:

• The standard line, word and character counts of a Word document, for example.
• Other analysis possibilities, where the default is to tell you what the most popular words or word sequences are.

The two optional choices count the following:

• The most popular word count reads every word and counts the number of times that it occurs. The top specified number of words is then output.
• The most popular sequences option looks for popular word sequences in the text and again outputs the most popular ones. For example, the number of times two or three words appear together. The graphic below is an example of the analysis panel, with an analysis of the menu text of the General panel displayed.

The analysis can be performed over the previously filtered text, a single text file, or text from a number of files combined. It is configurable and can be saved to a file in XML format, where several different analysis sets can then be compared themselves. Optional analysis features also allow you to remove numbers, symbols, or commonly occurring words from the analysis.

Example Processes

The following pages give further examples of formatting or filtering operations:

Demo Version

You can download the demo verson of the program, either as a windows installer, or a zip file with jar exe. The demo version is fully functional, except for the following: the redo / undo buttons are disabled and there is a reminder window that opens when you go to load or save a file. As there is no dedicated version changes page, you will need to check the documentation for this.

Buying the Application

If you buy a copy of the program, you will be entitled to free updates. You can register your copy, when you will receive a password for accessing the free updates. The only cost will be a £1.00 GBP admin fee.

System Requirements

Your system must meet the following requirements for the software to work:

• The installation package only runs on Windows, as a windows setup.exe.
• However, on request, a zip file can be provided for other operating systems.
• The program was written in Java and will require a relatively recent version of the Java JRE to run.

If you are unsure, then you can download the demo version first. It has the same interface and so if it is suitable then the professional version will also be suitable.

Purchasing the Software

The professional version can be bought for £30.00 from the payloadz online site, by clicking on the link below. If you contact me through this site, I can provide an operating system independent zip file instead.

Payloadz