Looking For Advice

[Bob3940]

The following was posted under the General catagory. I had one response where javascript was suggested. Any other suggestions?
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I get a weekly text file that contains hundreds of similar records. I use MS Word to scan through the file deleting about half and editing the others. The editing is mainly deleting whitespace and some reformatting to make the information easier to read. No information is added. This takes about 3 hours; very tedious.

I would like to write a program to automate this process. I have some programming experience with C and Basic, and Unix tools. I work on an iMac desktop computer. I am looking for recommendations on the best and easiest programming language to use. This is a one-time project so I want to minimize the effort needed to get this done. I think primarily what I need is string search, search and replace, and decision making capability based on the string search results. Commands that delete variable length whitespace would be helpful.

Thank you.

 

[BigDady]

I can't think of one programming language that does not have a lot of string commands, so any would be great to do what you want. I'd be surprised if such a program (app) isn't available now. I am also astonished that MS Word doesn't do this.