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Brian Schroer
Brian Schroer

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Sparky's Tool Tips: NimbleText

NimbleText is a Windows application, but if you're not on Windows or don't want to install something on your machine, there's an online version (albeit with fewer features).

I've been using NimbleText for about 15 years. (Actually, I started with Leon Bambrick's web site "The World's Simplest Code Generator", which eventually morphed into NimbleText.

The idea behind NimbleText is simple. You give it a delimited list of data and a substitution pattern, and it outputs resulting rows. Here's an animation from the NimbleText web site showing it being used to generate SQL statements:

Animated gif showing how NimbleText works

Functions

That's enough for most of the text manipulation I need to do, but there are also several column manipulation functions that can be inserted via its "Functions" menu:

  • toUpperCase
  • toLowerCase
  • toTitleCase
  • toPascalCase
  • toCamelCase
  • toSentenceCase
  • toWords
  • reverse
  • replace
  • htmlEncode
  • htmlDecode
  • urlEncode
  • urlDecode
  • xmlEncode
  • xmlDecode
  • split
  • charAt
  • indexOf
  • lastIndexOf
  • slice
  • substr
  • left
  • right
  • lpad
  • rpad
  • dateFormat

Here's how much I rely on NimbleText - I just reflexively used the tool to help write this post about the tool. I used it to combine dashes and function names to create the Markdown for that bulleted list of functions!😲

You can save/load data and patterns to/from local files.

Pricing

It's free!

You can purchase a license for $19.95 USD that unlocks some additional features like:

  • "where" filters
  • sorting
  • snippet management

I used NimbleText and other similarly priced tools for years for free before realizing that it's a pretty small price to pay for something so valuable. Don't be like me - If there's a tool that makes your life easier, throw the developers a few bucks.


While writing this post, I came across some things I didn't know (or had forgotten) that NimbleText can do. I'm looking forward to trying them out.

Give NimbleText a try, I think you'll like it!

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