Advice on research software

Posted by 22111
Aug 21, 2013 at 11:35 AM

I should perhaps have added
- that these special abilities are not proper to KEdit, but to so-called “Eastern text editors”
- that there is a (an original?) free editor, XEdit
- that the others, KEdit, and THE you mentioned (The Hessling Editor), are probably derivatives of that XEdit

But
- I don’t know those but by name, and it’s supposed there are some differences, though
- for KEdit there is ample material explaining its special functionality
- then, perhaps you could use that KEdit material in order to understand the respective functionality in XEdit and / or THE
- you can (perhaps not legally, but in practice) make ample use of KEdit since trial version just does not allow saving big files, but we are speaking of plain text files here…
- if you really use it on a “professional” basis, you might be delighted by it so much that you end up paying the 149 dollars
- which would never occur if you worked with the above alternatives, so technically, you are not bound to pay for KEdit, but you might pay out of respect for this fine program

Having said this, I think I should add that I just “played around” with KEdit, needing standardized procedures for which I do the scripting once, then have the script do, on different data, exactly the same manipulations.

But your task is very different from mine, you have to analyse data in a way you do not know which way beforehand, meaning you will see, within your analysing process, how to refine (or even switch) your further analysis, meaning your intermediate results will decide upon your further needs at any given moment, and for such “plastic”, not standardized, analysis, I never encountered anything better than KEdit.

Or any of those free alternatives mentioned above, provided they offer exactly the same functionality as KEdit in this respect, or even more.

Anyway, I’m afraid, every such solution will share the same problem as explained above: For “a = 1 or 2 or 3”, you will have to do it the way “a = 1 or a = 2 or a = 3”, neither “a in the range between 1 and 3” nor “a > 0 and < 4”, which is, of course, a big problem if the range is not “1 to 3” but “50 to 200”.

That’s why, in the end, for such tasks, you even could be in need of a third tool, for example Excel (and which perhaps better explains the prices of dedicated software). But then, for some intermediate needs, you could both try tricks like
- macros that will enter “search” strings like “a=1 or a=2…”, and not usings 1, 2, 3 but starting with 10 (or have 01,02,03…): this way you could easily identify ranges of ten
- using the regular expression capabilities of KEdit (or perhaps its free competitors; AS for example does not have such); if you are willing to delve into regex, you will even be able to replace any missing “a in the range from x to y” capability by the corresponding a bigger than regex “a = [...” and the corresponding lesser regex “a=[...”, and this even for decimal numbers

Of course, the alternatives might do this as well, and this way, 1 hour of searching for the correct regex “codings” will perhaps spare you perhaps days of manual work.