is there a program with scriptable or macro find/replace

in my current project, I'm going to need to do the same sequence of find/replace on text over and over throughout the development project. Is there a program that allows you to automate this? it would be extremely useful right about now.

You could make a batch file and use commandline tools to do it. There are many different commandline tools you can use.

This commandline utility looks pretty good:http://www.programmersheaven.com/download/41236/download.aspx

Example batch file:

@echo off 
rem seach and replace batch 
set myfile=main.cpp 
ssr 0 "birds" "cows" "%myfile%" 
ssr 0 "foo" "bar" "%myfile%" 
set myfile= 
[/code:1tc3vuwi]

not sure what you mean by macro and i might not be helping with what your asking but i know that word has a find and replace/replace all ect. thats pretty handy. again this might not be what you mean by macro :S

thanks quazi and rojo.

I noticed after this post that notepad++ has a record macro feature, so I'll probably test that out first. [edit: nm, the macro recorder in notepad++ won't record find/replace actions, presumably because it only records what happens while the main program window is in focus[not the find/replace child window])

but what I meant quazi, is I have to find and replace several things in a row, in a certain order, like

Find "applesauce", replace with "butter"

Find "apple", replace with "pear"

Find "you", replace with "me"

Find "bloodcell", replace with "nanobot"

it's a long sequence of these, that I'll probably have to do a few hundred times before I'm done developing my current project. So it'd save me alot of time and carpal tunnel, if it was automated, and I just hit one key, and it did the whole process for me.

So like why not make an app in Construct?

You could easily make something to load a text file, or copy pasta from the clipboard.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/construct/index.php?title=System_Expressions#Text

In particular:

Remove(source, string) 
    Removes all occurences of string within source [/code:221qxbve]

Depending upon what format your source text is in, Python can also make short work of such a problem. If you can import the text into a python string (or list of strings), or even paste it into a Construct EditBox object, you can do something like this:

text = "one plus one equals two, and four minus three equals one." 
terms = [['three', 'five'], 
         ['four', 'seven'], 
         ['two', 'four'], 
         ['one', 'two']] 
for find, repl in terms: 
    text = text.replace(find, repl) 
print text[/code:2l3t03l5] 
 
...which results in this: 
 
[code:2l3t03l5]two plus two equals four, and seven minus five equals two.[/code:2l3t03l5] 
 
There are some [url=http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#string-methods]pretty powerful string methods built-in to Python[/url]. You can even do this in Construct.

in my current project, I'm going to need to do the same sequence of find/replace on text over and over throughout the development project. Is there a program that allows you to automate this? it would be extremely useful right about now.

lucid, I think, that JGsoft PowerGREP is what you are looking for. You may also try this - Funduc Search and Replace. Sorry, both are shareware. I believe, that there is a freeware program somewhere, but I don't know exactly.

Suppose, it will help you.