Organizing giveaways on the blog is quite troublesome because it involves a lot of manual work such as extracting all the users and IP address from the comments, then scan and remove the duplicate entries, and finally enter the participants in a list randomizer at random.org to randomly pick the winners. Although there are giveaway plugins for WordPress to do all that, but I don’t like the idea of installing too many plugins on my server when it is not going to benefit the users. One of a very powerful freeware that has helped me greatly in those task is TextCrawler. I’ve previously written an article on how you can search a particular word in multiple editable text files with TextCrawler and today I will be sharing with you on how easy it is to remove duplicate lines in text files with TextCrawler. In fact Notepad++, my favorite text editing software is also capable of deleting duplicate lines.
To remove duplicate lines with TextCrawler:
1. Download and install TextCrawler if it is not installed on your computer.
2. Run TextCrawler, click View from menubar and select View Scratchpad.
3. Copy the text and paste it the Scratchpad.
4. Make sure that the Remove Duplicate Lines is selected from the drop down box and click the Go button.
5. At the bottom of the Scratchpad will show how many duplicate lines are removed.
You don’t need to use TextCrawler if you already have Notepad++ installed because you can delete the duplicate lines with it. Notepad++ requires TextFX plugin to remove the duplicate lines and you can verify if the TextFX plugin is installed by looking for TextFX on the Notepad++ menubar. If you don’t see TextFX on the menubar, click Plugins from the menubar, go to Plugin Manager and select Show Plugin Manager. Go to the Installed tab to confirm that TextFX is not installed and then click on the Available tab to look for TextFX Characters plugin. If you don’t see TextFX on the list, then you probably have the unicode version of Notepad++ installed.
To install TextFX plugin in Notepad++, click the Settings button at the Plugin Manager window and check Show unstable plugins followed by clicking the OK button. Now you should see TextFX Characters listed in the Available tab. Check it, click the Install button and restart Notepad++ when prompted to.
Now that you have TextFX plugin installed in Notepad++, follow the few simple steps below to remove duplicate lines.
1. Open the text file that you want to remove the duplicate lines in Notepad++.
2. Click on TextFX at the menubar, go to TextFX Tools and select “+Sort outputs only UNIQUE (at column) lines”
3. Now you can either click on Sort lines case sensitive (at column) or Sort lines case insensitive (at column) from TextFX > TextFX Tools to remove the duplicate lines.
Remove Duplicate Lines with TextCrawler Scratchpad or Notepad++ is a post from: Raymond.CC Blog