Manipulating text with BBEdit

Manipulating text with BBEdit

But the other thing I use BBEdit for is a bit more esoteric and hard to describe—something I call “text munging”, for lack of a better word.

Text munging takes many forms, but generally it happens when you’ve got a bunch of text in one format and you need to get it into a different format. I’ve used BBEdit to transform the source pages of websites, to format a mailing list properly, and more. Today I used it to generate a podcast feed out of a chunk of HTML.

BBEdit has been my go-to text editor, notepad, and “text munger” since I started using a Mac as my primary computer, I think around 2001-2002.

I depend on it many times daily, and similar to Snell, just last week used BBEdit to migrate blog posts from a broken Movable Type installation by transforming its static HTML files into XML for importing to WordPress.

Related reading: learning regex via BBEdit.

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