Sometimes we have to update the source code of large projects containing several hundred files. In these hundreds of files, if we have to replace a string in all of the files manually then we might have to spend the entire night going through each of these files. Even if we use an advanced text editor such as Notepad++, we have to open one file at a time and only then we can use the find & replace feature of this popular text editor.
If you want to find and replace a string or word inside thousands of text files then we can use something like TextCrawler. This small application can go through an entire drive or folder and perform the search & replace function on all of them in a matter of seconds.
TextCrawler is a single window application and looks very similar to the open-source grepWin. In its window, we can specify which folder we have to crawl through for text files, which strings should be searched for and which string should they be replaced with. It supports Regular Expressions and we can search for strings using the RegEx. It also supports UNICODE and we can work with text files with content written in many non-Latin languages.
There are many other options such as adding filters to filenames and file extensions when it is crawling through the folders. For example, we can specify DSC*.TXT and it will look only for the text files starting with “DSC” having an extension TXT.
As far as the output is concerned, we can make it update the original files or make it save the changes to new files. It also supports making a backup of all the files that it is going to modify. We can even create batch jobs where we can add search and replace functions for multiple strings.
You can download TextCrawler from https://www.digitalvolcano.co.uk/textcrawler.html.