by Chris Taylor

It is a wonderful example of "Users Helping Users". Our Web Master, Brigitte Lord, was having problems extracting reviews from the plain text version of the newsletter and turning them into Web pages, for publishing at opcug.ca/soft_rev.htm. The main problem was the fact that each line ended in a hard carriage return and it was a laborious process to remove them.

At the Internet SIG meeting some members.discussed this and Bob Gowan, the Internet SIG coordinator mentioned he had been using a shareware program that could help.

eClean 2000 v2.0 is a tool primarily designed to aid in cleaning up messages that have been forwarded many times. It is not all that unusual to get a message that looks similar to the following

> >>Dear
>Hank,
> >>>
> >>I have a great idea for a new
> >>product line for the ACME Widget
>Company!
> >>>
> >>Since we make the smallest and
> >>fastest widgets
>in the world,
> >>why not make the most expensive? We
> >>could add a new gizmo to the
>wacha-ma-callit
> >>or a whatsit to the thing-a-ma-jiggy
>and
> >>add 500% to our margin!
> >>But Best of all, each gizmo will
> >>only add 1% to
>the cost of making
> >>a widget and whatsit will only
> >>add 2%. This could be colossal! I just
> >>don't know what people did before
> >>gizmo's and whatsit's where
> invented,
> >>but we have to add them to our
> >>widget. Let me know what you think.
> >>
> >>Best regards,
> >>
> >>Bill

Of course, in most cases the message is actually a joke that you want to pass on to someone else. But if you simply forward the message, it will likely just add some more greater-than signs and make the mess even worse. Unfortunately, nobody wants to take the time and trouble to clean things up.

Enter eClean 2000. You can simply copy the whole mess to the clipboard, double click eClean's tray icon to open its window, paste in the text and with a single click you can have eClean remove all the forwarding characters. As well, you can have eClean reconstruct paragraphs as single lines (which is what Brigitte needed), and even perform global search and replaces to clean up any other weird things in the text.

To make things even easier, you can have eClean work directly with text on the clipboard. This reduces the keystrokes or mouse clicks even more.

The program is highly customizable and uses about 1.8MB or RAM on my Win2K machine.

You can download eClean 2000 v2 from PUB II in the Miscellaneous Utilities file area as eclean20.zip

Originally published: March, 2001

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