Pipelines

Pipelines is a utility that allows you to change the contents of a text file or files, quickly and easily. You can specify that only certain sections of a file are to be changed; you can confine those changes to a column, word or field range, translate words and phrases, discard or insert new lines of text. You can perform a whole range of operations on a file or files, using only a simple set of commands.

Pipelines build's on the concept of directing the output of one process to the input of another; commonly known as pipelining.

However, Pipelines takes an extra step; allowing you to build multi-stream pipelines, where the topology is no longer horizontal and linear, but two-dimensional; where the records travel up and down the pipeline chain through intersecting joints which control the flow of data.

With standard linear pipelines the data flows through each filter or stage, passing into the next and so on until it reaches a sink. Multi-stream pipelines on the other hand allow you to select and operate on specific sets of records; routing unselected records through a joint into and out of other sections of the pipeline. This allows you to join multiple pipelines together in configurations that address a whole range of transformation problems.

Pipelines comprises 46 input, output, selection and transformation stages which cover a broad range of manipulation functions; splitting records, stripping characters, joining records, collating and sorting and more.

On the whole, similar operations are performed by a single stage; which means that you do not have to remember the names of an unnecessarily lengthy list of stages. For example; stripping characters from a record, Pipelines provides a single stage called STRIP which removes characters from the beginning and/or the end of a record.

The Pipelines syntax is very simple; it does not employ lists of terse /switches, but rather, an English-like syntax which is straight forward to read.

With Pipelines, the pipeline can be specified on the system command-line, in a batch file or in a Pipelines file, ext (.PPL). You design the pipeline in your favourite editor and save it; to execute the pipeline you simply double click the file icon and Pipelines will launch it.

You can specify pipelines which accept arguments which substitute stage operands and even stage names and coupled with the capability to connect pipelines together this allows you build a range of utility pipelines that can be called upon whenever you need them.

You may find Pipelines of use in many cases where you might otherwise have to write a program to solve the problem and it may well save you some time and effort that could be better spent on other tasks.