Design

Text-Zap was designed to not just meet my needs but hopefully the needs of others as well. To that end Text-Zap was built on top of Ant which has industry wide acceptance and is known for its flexibility.

There are two main parts to Text-Zap, the Ant task, and the individual filters.

^topAnt Task

The Text-Zap Ant Task is the driver for Text-Zap and is responsible to make things happen. It performs three tasks:

1. It selects the files that are to be processed.
2. It selects and configures the filters that are to do the work.
3. When the filters are done it saves the files to disk.

All the files are passed to each filter at once. This allows the filters to not only modify the text in the files, but it can manipulate the files themselves, such as break them apart or put them together.

There are several general properties that the Ant task controls that effect the entire application. These include the file encoding and overwrite permissions to name a few.

For more information about using the Ant Task, see the Text-Zap Ant Task page.

For more specifics on the Text-ZapTask class see the api documents.

^topFilters

The Text-Zap filters do the real work. Each filter is assigned a specific job. The real power of the filters is when they are chained together.