I know it costs money, but I'm a huge fan of Powergrep, but there are days where I'll do hundreds of regex searches on large sets of docs (either looking for patterns in large collections of text or hacking Drupal). I can't live without it at this point.
Most people think that for $159 it should fly the space shuttle too, but the number of hours this thing has saved me over the years means it has paid for itself many times over. It's like GREP plus SED plus piping plus all sorts of stuff.
- every occurence you find is a link to it's place in the text
- you can create complex chains of regex search and replace (useful for cleaning Word files or character encoding gone bad)
- you can collect and format data
- the developer has fixed pretty much every bug report I've filed in a timely manner (and now I almost never find bugs) and even gave me two free upgrades just for reporting minor bugs - he cares that much about making it better.
http://powergrep.com/Damn... with a hardsell like that, I should have made that an aff link.
