Every now and then I need to turn a plain text list in to a useable list for my code. For example, I want to turn this plain list:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday

In to something like this:

String[] weekDays = {"Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday"};

For small lists like that a manual process is fine. However, for large lists it's too just much to do it by hand.

That's when I normally use my favourite text editor, TextPad, for the job.

Let's say we have a list of American state codes and their corresponding names, which we want to turn in to a list of strings by surrounding each with quotation marks and a delimiter. That's, like, doing the same thing 100 times. Instead you can simple use Regualar Expressions in a power-editor's Replace dialog and have it done in a matter of seconds with no risk of repetitive strain injury.

In the shot below I've pasted my list in to Textpad and then opened the Replace dialog.

Notice I've told it I'm looking for regular expression matches and that I'm searching for $ which in regex parlance is the end of a line. Hitting Replace All then puts a quote mark and a colon at the end of each line, as below:

You can see how easy this is already, right?

In the shot above I've kept the Replace dialog open and told it to look for ^ (start of line) and replace it with a ", which leads to the list below:

Nearly done. Now, in the shot above, I'm looking for all carriage returns (new lines) and replacing them with nothing. Which leads to the list below:

It's now ready to paste straight in to your code!!

The above example was for a Notes @Formula list, but it's obviously very simple to adapt to any type of language.

This was a simple example of what can be even more powerful when you get your head round using RegEx in a string search/replace pattern.