Post-Process Substituted and Collected Text

Often, when converting files with search-and-replace or when collecting data, the original search match isn’t quite in the format you’d like it to be. E.g. when extracting Google queries from referring URLs in your web server’s log files, varies characters in the Google queries are URL-encoded, making them hard to read.

PowerGREP’s “extra processing” feature gives you the unique ability to search-and-replace each individual search match or substitution text with an extra regular expression or even an extra list of regular expressions. This way you can use far simpler regular expressions or even literal text to convert or extract the data in the format you want.

In the screen shot, you can see a PowerGREP action and its results, extracting Google queries from the logs of this web site. The action is available as an example in the PowerGREP library. The extra processing, which you can see in the bottom center of the screen shot, is set to a list of seven easy plain text substitutions. These replace the 7 most common URL-encoded characters in each collected Google query. Doing this with a single regular expression in a basic Windows grep tool would have been impossible.

There are two ways in which you can get your own copy of PowerGREP and evaluate the software risk-free.

The best option is to buy your own copy of PowerGREP for US$ 159. Your purchase is covered by Jan Goyvaerts's personal three month risk-free unconditional money-back guarantee. This allows you to try the software without any limitations and without any risk for three months.

Alternatively, you can download the free evaluation version of PowerGREP. The free evaluation version can be downloaded anonymously. It allows you to explore PowerGREP for 15 days of actual use. Full documentation is included. The documentation extensively covers both PowerGREP itself, and the regular expression syntax.