TextSoap for Mac

CNET Editors' review

by: Paul Hughes on September 29, 2009

TextSoap is a powerful utility with a single purpose: to quickly clean up text from any source, so that you can reuse it in other applications. A godsend for software developers and Web designers who have to frequently work with a motley variety of text, TextSoap can almost instantly remove extra spaces and "garbage characters" while still maintaining text formatting--and it can also automatically convert formatting like bold and italics into its HTML equivalent by inserting tags.

The app's clean interface looks much like any simple text editor, but you'll find most of its power in a slide-out drawer that contains TextSoap's "cleaners." You can click on a "SCRUB" cleaner to handle the most common problems (like removing e-mail forwarding marks and fixing line breaks), or you can choose from more than 100 different cleaners, collected in functional groups like E-mail, Markdown, and HTML. You can also create your own cleaners for customized work flows.

TextSoap is also available within other applications via Mac OS X Services, and several popular apps (including BBEdit and Coda) are supported through plug-ins. You can even integrate TextSoap into AppleScript and Automator work flows. Unfortunately, the app has a fairly strict trial version (results are truncated to just 3K) and a somewhat steep price tag--but there's no question that for certain users, TextSoap can boost productivity by eliminating a lot of repetitive tasks.