Link: http://portal.tapor.ca/news-feeds/2.rss/156

The first full version (1.1) of UVic's Transformer open-source Unicode search-and-replace tool has been released.

Back in February, we announced a beta version of this application; the full package is now complete, including documentation and source code, and is available from here: http://www.tapor.uvic.ca/~mholmes/transformer/ Transformer was created as part of a project to rescue some very old linguistics data, which was stored in a combination of Lexware and DOS WordPerfect files, by converting it to Unicode. Non-ascii characters were represented in the data by nasty sequences of control characters used to switch between obsolete character-sets and long-gone fonts in WordPerfect. In order to convert the data, we had to create and test a huge sequence of search-and-replace operations which would find these strings and replace them with the correct Unicode codepoints for IPA characters. To make this process easier for ourselves, we created a Transformer, a Windows application which enables you to create, organize and test sequences of search/replace operations (including regular expressions), then run them in batch mode on a set of files. It is released as open-source under the MPL 1.1.