Software Engineering Stories

If you are a Web developer you will have to handle JSON strings, for developing, debugging and testing applications and APIs. During theses processes you will also have to use JSON strings that are copied for a HTTP sniffing/dumping tool (e.g. the developer tools of your browser) to analyse them, present them or share them. In that case, you will need to beautify them so that they become human friendly and readable. How do you do that fast and efficiently? OK, there may be a trillion different ways, and almost all IDEs that have some respect for themselves provide such JSON formatting functionality. But IDEs are heavy, and you typically will not create a new file to copy and paste the JSON string to beautify it and then discard it. I've seen many people resorting to "online" formatting tools (i.e. javascript-based formatters), but do you really need to do that (plus, you may be "sharing" you data without realizing it)? Notepad++ to the rescue again!  ...

One of the best text editors in Windows is Notepad++ as it is lightweight, it provides a wealth of useful functionality –let alone the possible extensions through plugins. File Summary A useful feature of Notepad++ is that you can easily get a view on the size metrics of the document you are currently working on (characters, words, lines, etc). However, the menu is not that intuitive on finding that capability. So in order to get the above values you should go to: View >> Summary… The summary contains the following: Full path Created Modified File length (in byte) Characters (without blanks) Words Lines Current document length Selected Area Summary Nevertheless, the above summary provides file-level statistics and it may only provide the number of bytes and characters of a selected area. In order to count the word, characters, lines, etc. for just a selected part of the file you can install and use the TextFX Character plugin through the...