Huge text file I need to edit. Something better than Excel?

[Frank]

I have an 8mb text file full of offices, phone numbers, and lots of undesirable symbols and spaces. Talking it started out with over 191,000 lines. I imported it into Excel and managed to carve out over half getting it down to about 82,000 by deleting duplicate lines and blank lines, but I am still left with a mess to work with. I don't have any scripting experience. I am wanting to learn how to eliminate the multiple spaces, asterisks, periods, and such, but if I were to sort the data, I will wreck the whole thing. Any ideas?


Once I am all done, I would like to learn how to create some kind of interface where I could type in an office name (they use 3 letter symbols like airports do) and it would bring up all the contacts for that site.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Craizie]

youtube that shit.

[Gtracer]

Control f/ replace to remove the unwanted characters...unless you just delete the whole row, then you can just use a filter

82k lines might slow your processor down for a sec though

[Nash B.]

Does it have a known format/layout (ie name in columns 1-20, office code in columns 21-23, phone in columns 25-34, etc.)?

[Frank]

Does it have a known format/layout (ie name in columns 1-20, office code in columns 21-23, phone in columns 25-34, etc.)?

No, I wish it did. Its pretty jumbled. I am thinking a lot of what I will have to do is manual.

[yellowstang]

Throw it on a Linux/Unix box and use awk/sed to search or replace shit. Or vi, a little harder but still works.

[momo]

sounds like you should be using microsoft access, not excel.

import that data to a table.
use a query to delete duplicates.
sort however you want.

you can build your interface (called a form).

[Frank]

sounds like you should be using microsoft access, not excel.

import that data to a table.
use a query to delete duplicates.
sort however you want.

you can build your interface (called a form).

I never worked with it before. I do have it installed and found some tutorials on youtube so I guess I will learn. I don't have access to much of the other ideas suggested. I will figure it out Monday.

[8mpg]

ms access is complicated shit if you dont know how to use it.

If it isnt very personal info, jump on elance and pay someone $5 to do it.

[Frank]

ms access is complicated shit if you dont know how to use it.

If it isnt very personal info, jump on elance and pay someone $5 to do it.

I wish. Pretty confidential stuff though I can't share out. I will keep it in mind for the future though.

[mikeb]

You can download notepad++ for free; i think it will handle a file of that size.