Huge file - need to find/replace a standard text within it - but the file is so big I can only open it?

Question

in notepad. When I used the "find x, replace all with y" command, it took all night, and I had to stop it after 10 hours. Any easier way of doing this? The file contains all numbers and/or text except for sth that needs to be cleaned once every 11 rows. How can I deal with this- I need my computer, too. Thanks to all answerers and computer users out there.

Answer 1

Download a free trial version of UltraEdit (http://www.ultraedit.com/); it's a very powerful text editor that can handle tasks like this very easily and includes sophisticated search & replace as well as macro functionality.

You could perform the action once, record it as a macro and then tell UltraEdit to keep replaying it until it's done.

Big files are also not a problem as there's a quick open mode that only reads in the section of file it needs to rather than trying to load the entire file before letting you have access to it.

Answer 2

I filed on 2/5 and generally happening on 2/5.. nevertheless no dd and we are nevertheless no longer waiting to reserve my transcripts I have not considered each person else from diverse web pages which have filed after feb 4 th get a dd yet. it type of feels that peeps from jan 30 through feb 4 who filed were given dd this week everywhere from feb 12 or 13.. I spoke to an honestly IRS rep the former day on the phone and he suggested each and every thing replaced into proper with my go back he talked about no subject matters and that i basically prefer to furnish them time to finally end up! yet truly it really is problematical perchance we are able to all get a dd on the instantaneous on wmr website for the 14 or 15 or sixteenth... conserving my palms crossed good success everybody

Answer 3

Is it broken up into individual lines w CR/LF or equivalent?

Use Perl -- this is modified from a script I wrote that does the same thing, opening a file (referred to here as "your_input_file.ext"), reading in each line one by one, substituting one string with another, and then writing each line to "your_output_file.ext" with the new text in place of the old text:

$outfile = "your_output_file.ext";

$file = "your_input_file.ext";
open(FILE, $file) || die "Failed opening input \n";
@lines = ;
close($file);

foreach (@lines)

{
$atext = $_;
$atext =~ s/search/replace/g;
open(MYFILE, ">>$outfile") || die "Failed opening output \n";
print MYFILE "$atext";
close(MYFILE);
}

Replace the words "search" and "replace" with the strings you're actually looking for. (One cool thing about Perl: numbers are strings too, at least if you're looking for them; they're only numbers if you have to use an arithmetic operator on them.)

You may need to learn how to code any "special" characters -- basically, anything you're searching for apart from A to Z, a to z and 0 to 9 needs to have a backslash in front of it.

Lotsa good references on line for Perl, and it's free. Start with the Perl home page and go from there...

Answer 4

makes no sense - Notepad limits the size of file you can open and refer you to Write or Wordpad if it is too large, so the file can't be that big . . .

use Excel or Word

Answer 5

Use word pad (standard with Windows), it can handle larger files

Answer 6

Open it with a real program like Word, or WordPerfect, etc.