LGOSystems Product: Stripper

Shareware US$10.00

Stripper is a drag-and-drop utility for performing simple operations on text files. Stripper began life in the early 1980s on the IBM PC. Its original purpose was to convert WordStar files to 7-bit ASCII. It "stripped the high bits", hence its name.

Stripper is compiled as a “universal binary” and runs on Mac OS X 10.4.5 (Tiger) or later.

Stripper's functions include:

Changing line-endings to conform with various conventions
Forcing case changes
Joining lines into paragraphs
Stripping high bits
Discarding control characters
Compressing runs of white-space or expanding tabs.

Problem	Solution
Need to send text files to a Windows™ system, where the transfer doesn't implicitly fix the line-endings?	Select "Windows" and drop the file onto Stripper.
Need to recover text from a corrupted word-processing document?	Select "7-Bit ASCII" and "Discard Controls", and use the Open command to open the file (the Open command will process any file regardless of type or extension; as a safety feature, the drag and drop options will only work on text files).
Need to paste text from an email into a word-processing document but find there's a line ending after every line (instead of after every paragraph)?	Select "Guess paragraphs" and drop the email file(s) onto Stripper.
Need to reuse text from an email but find that quoting-indendation has inserted reams of useless white-space?	Select "Compress spaces" and drop the email file(s) onto Stripper.
Need to import a Unix file into a report but find that the way the tabs are handled play havocs with your report?	Select "Expand Tabs" and drop the Unix file(s) onto Stripper
Need to do any or all of the above for multiple files?	Drag and drop all the files onto Stripper together. Stripper uses threads to maximise throughput. Stripper will automatically take advantage of multiple CPUs if you have them.
Need to process some files with one lot of settings, then another set of files with different settings?	Stripper remembers the settings in force when a file is dropped on it. Changing the settings does not affect any files already in the queue. Stripper's settings also persist across program launches.
Don't care about keeping the original file intact?	The "Overwrite" option updates your files in place.
Want to play it safe and keep the original around until you're sure the new file is what you want?	The "Backup" option saves your original with a ~.txt extension.
Want to leave the original file entirely alone?	The "Generate" option saves your new file with a .out extension.

Sure, there are other ways of doing these things with standard Unix utilities. Stripper simply saves you the trouble of remembering the commands and options.

Best of all, Stripper is ShareWare. You only need to pay for it if you find it useful and decide to keep it.

For software history buffs:

This is the sixth incarnation of Stripper. Version 1.x was a command-line tool for MS-DOS written in Turbo Pascal. Version 2.x was ported to Mac OS System 6.0.3 using Think Pascal. Version 3.x was a rewrite for Mac OS System 7 using Object Pascal. Version 4.x returned to the Wintel platform under Windows 3.x using Borland tools. Version 5.x marked the move to Code Warrior on the Mac for Mac OS 8, still in Pascal and still single-threaded.

Version 6.x ported the central algorithms to Objective-C as a multi-threaded Cocoa application for Mac OS X.

Online Help

Check out Stripper's complete online help for additional information.

Shareware US$10.00