Good Text List transformation Software

Question

Let's say I have a list of items like so:

default
cube
page
concave
zoom
linear
fade
none

and I want to change it to the following:

'default'   => t('default'),
'cube'      => t('cube'),
'page'      => t('page'),
'concave'   => t('concave'),
'zoom'      => t('zoom'),
'linear'    => t('linear'),
'fade'      => t('fade'),
'none'      => t('none'),

Are there any GUI based projects that could let me do this. I know the Mac has Grep Built in and there is also Text Wrangler that allows for GREP, but I find that these are too complicated (especially for short simple lists). Are there any GUI solutions?

Answer 1

The Unix shell is probably the best text list transformation software.

$ sed "s/^/'/;s/$/'/" <<< cube | awk '{printf "%-12s=> t(%s),\n",$1,$1}'
'cube'   => t('cube'),
$ sed -E "s/(.*)/'\\1' => t('\\1'),/" <<< cube | column -t
'cube'  =>  t('cube'),

Or write throwaway scripts in some scripting language:

puts "cube
page".gsub(/^.*/) { "'#{$&}'".ljust(11) + " => '#{$&}'," }

Even if there were GUI applications for tasks like this, it would probably be more useful to learn (or get faster at using) scripting languages or text editors.