Advanced text search

[Treewyrm]

I think what you mean is called regular expressions. A very powerful string search and replace engine. It's not very friednly though, sometimes you can loose your head trying to understand what that long expression means but still it's very useful, I have been using it for quite some time and it came out handy at times saving a lot of time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
http://www.regular-expressions.info/

Many advaned text editors support regular expressions in some way. I can't say if EditPad does, I use TextPad personally, but I'm sure it does.

I can make you replacement expression if you tell me what symbols are allowed in those values (especially if spaces are allowed within the value).

In your case it would probably be this (doesn't work if you have spaces in values, for that it needs to be modified a little bit):

Search expression: "^([[:alnum:]]+)[\ ]*\=[\ ]*([[:alnum:]]+)$"
Replace expression: "$1 = $2" with <strike>PCRE_UNGREEDY flag set on</strike> (figued it's not needed there)

Look for regular expression support in your text editor, usually it is in "search and replace" tool, typically a checkbox enabling usage of expressions in fields.

I use regular expressions a lot when I need to clean up someone's else code (I like when everything looks in the very same style and syntax).

edit:

Ok, here is search expression if you want to have spaces (or just any symbol except for "=" and newline) in values: "^(?U)(.*)[ ]*\=(?-U)[ ]*(.*)$". Replace expression is the same as in previous example.

All it does it looking for lines with pair "value1= value2" no matter now many spaces are between "value" and "=" (there can be none, one, two, three spaces, etc), the result will always turn it into "value1 = value2" pair.

I hope this helps.

Regular expression is a very powerful tool. Coding a dedicated program for this purpose is overkill, IMO.