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As of October, 2016, Embarcadero is offering a free release
of Delphi (Delphi
10.1 Berlin Starter Edition ). There
are a few restrictions, but it is a welcome step toward making
more programmers aware of the joys of Delphi. They do say
"Offer may be withdrawn at any time", so don't delay if you want
to check it out. Please use the
feedback link to let
me know if the link stops working.
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Mensa®
Daily Puzzlers
For over 15 years
Mensa Page-A-Day calendars have provided several puzzles a year
for my programming pleasure. Coding "solvers" is most fun,
but many programs also allow user solving, convenient for "fill
in the blanks" type. Below are Amazon links to the
two most recent years.
Mensa®
365 Puzzlers Calendar 2017
Mensa®
365 Puzzlers Calendar 2018
(Hint: If you can
wait, current year calendars are usually on sale in January.)
Contact
Feedback:
Send an
e-mail with your comments about this program (or anything else).
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Here's a "quick and dirty" little program to remove blank lines
from a specified input text file and write non-blank lines to a specified output file.
The program was motivated when our Booksearch Index page somehow had 35,0000 lines
containing only 10 blank characters per line somehow got inserted among
136 valid htm code lines. This expanded the HTML file from 12 Kbytes to 360KBytes and hung
FrontPage, my web editor program.
After a 20 minute effort at manually deleting blanks, the job was less than 10%
complete with no assurance that I hadn't accidentally deleted valid lines,
so the manual approach was abandoned.
This program has 25 lines of my code and took about 15 minutes to code and run to complete the job.
Computers rule! (Sometimes J.)
Addendum August 13, 2006: A viewer with hundreds of files to
fix, wrote asking for a version which would allow multiple files to be selected
for processing in a single run. Version 2, posted today, provides
that ability. Files are selected by the standard multi-select technique;
use Click and Shift-click to select a range of files,
use Ctrl-click to select or deselect individual files. Options are
provided to backup files before processing or to provide a new name for each
file.
October 30 2011: Here is a command line version of the program which
will operate from a command line or from a Windows batch file. Either one is enough trouble to set up to make one appreciate the GUI features
of current Delphi and Windows versions. Nevertheless, batch files can be
an easy way to repetitively run a program without user intervention. That's
the case for a user who requested this batch version of ClearBlankLines.
Parameters allow masked searches for files to be processed including ability to
search subdirectories, and to make backups of files which are changed.
Since most people, will probably not be interested in this version, I'll refer
those who are to the Batch version download below. It contains a "Readme"
file outlining program usage and also a sample ".bat" batch file with a couple
of text files for testing. It runs OK here, but write if you find
bugs or have questions, drop me an email and I'll try to help..
May 11, 2012: Version 3 of the user interactive version and
Version 2 of the command line version were posted today with the added
option of trimming leading blanks from lines which contain text in addition to
removing entirely blank lines. .
June 11, 2012: Last month's posting triggered a number of
enhancement requests from users. Version 3.1 posted today adds these
features:
 | Trailing blanks as well as leading blanks can now be removed from
non-blank lines |
| Leading "Tab" characters, previously treated a spaces
and deleted with the "leading blanks" option, may now be optionally
retained or deleted when leading or trailing blanks are removed. |
| A "character select" option allows lines with a specified
character to be removed or to be the only lines retained in the output.
This was requested by a user needing to extract email addresses from text
files. Retaining lines with "@" characters will ease the process. |
| A new "case" option allows text to be converted to upper or
lower case. |
Note: The command mode version, now has 12
instead of the previous 3 parameters. Basic testing of the new features
was completed but the chance of unintended interactions among the hundreds of
possible parameter combinations has increased. The user
remains solely responsible for results, so testing and retaining backups before
any mass conversion is strongly recommended!
November 8, 2012: I
found another reason to modify Clear Blanks recently which
led to posting Version 4 today. I, along with many others, still use
Delphi 7 as my first choice compiler. One of the minor irritations has
been that their final Help file update included Kylix (a Delphi 7 Linux version)
help items in the D7Ref.toc (table of contents) file. This typically added extra
time and an extra click to look up a Windows version VCL control. But
every Kylix help entry in the table of contents contains the string "[CLX]".
It was simple to modify the "character select" option from the June update
to find embedded strings rather than single characters to select lines to delete
or keep. Presto-change-o, my Delphi help file no longer knows that Kylix
ever existed! For flexibility, I also added a "Match case" check box
to control whether the string searches are case sensitive.
December 22, 2012: Version 4.1 addresses a
couple of small issues with both the Windows and the Command line versions of
Clear Blank Lines.
| When removing blank lines, previous versions
required the "Treat Tabs as spaces" option be set. Version 4.1 honors
the Tabs option, deleting only truly blank lines if the option is not
set but treating tabs as spaces when the option is set.
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| All deleted lines were previously written to
a " Deleted" file just in case, even when only blank lines were being
removed. Now only runs which have deleted non-blank lines create the
file,
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Download source
Download
executable
Download source and executable for
the Batch Command line version
| Created: September 19, 2005 |
Modified:
May 11, 2018 |
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