Slicing fruit!

If there’s one thing I firmly believe it’s that I think all translators should learn a little bit of regex, or regular expressions.  In fact it probably wouldn’t hurt anyone to know how to use them a little bit simply because they are so useful for manipulating text, especially when it comes to working in and out of spreadsheets.  When I started to think about this article today I was thinking about how to slice up text so that it’s better segmented for translation; and I was thinking about what data to use.  I settled on lists of data as this sort of question comes up quite often in the community and to create some sample files I used this wikipedia page.  It’s a good list, so I copied it as plain text straight into Excel which got me a column of fruit formatted exactly as I would like to see it if I was translating it, one fruit per segment.  But as I wanted to replcate the sort of lists we see translators getting from their customers I copied the list into a text editor and used regex to replace the hard returns (
) with a comma and a space, then broke the file up alphabetically… took me around a minute to do.  I’m pretty sure that kind of simple manipulation would be useful for many people in all walks of life.  But I digress….

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