|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
About Stripper
|
|
Stripper began life in the early 1980s on an original IBM PC. At the time, WordStar was the text editor of choice. WordStar operated directly on text files and would set the high bits on various bytes within a file as part of its justification algorithm, thereby making those files fairly useless for anything else.
|
|
|
|
Stripper's original purpose was to unconditionally strip the high bits from all the bytes in a WordStar file, thereby making the file usable for other things. Hence the name Stripper.
|
|
|
|
Stripper's functionality was extended steadily during the mid-to-late '80s:
-
Text files were being exchanged with a proprietary mainframe system which only supported upper-case letters, so the ability to force case-changes was useful;
-
Text files downloaded from another type of proprietary mainframe system would arrive randomly peppered with control characters and DELs. The ability to remove such junk from a file, or to recover as much text as possible from corrupted document files, was also useful;
-
Text files being exchanged with Unix systems would cause problems if the line-endings were not the correct type. Also, the inherent quality of PC software having been firmly established from that platform's earliest days, being able to ensure valid line-endings on local files was an advantage. When Macs provided a third flavour of line-ending, the ability to reliably convert between all three became essential;
-
Although Unix had long understood tab characters, not all PC and Mac software was so obliging. Therefore, the ability to deal with white-space in a sensible fashion was helpful; and
-
The ability to rejoin adjacent lines into paragraphs often saved a lot of time.
|
|
|
|
The basic algorithm has remained unchanged since the late 1980s. Although it began life as a Turbo Pascal program on an IBM PC, Stripper has existed on PCs, Macs, Unix boxes and mainframes, as both command-line and GUI-based applications, written in various flavours of Pascal and C.
|
|
|
|
This release is written in Objective-C using the Cocoa frameworks and takes advantage of Mac OS X’s multi-threading capabilities.
|
|
|
|
And, remaining faithful to the ping-pong nature of its history, Stripper is now released as a universal binary so that it runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel chips.
|
|
|
|
|
|
