Tip of the Week: Text Editing - Extract Data

At times you might need to extract data from a large text. Let's say you have a JSON response, and you want to extract all the id fields in the response and combine them as comma separated. Here's how you can easily extract data from large text using Sublime (or any other text editor that supports simultaneous editing).

// https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts
[
  {
    "userId": 1,
    "id": 1,
    "title": "sunt aut facere repellat provident occaecati excepturi optio reprehenderit",
    "body": "quia et suscipit\nsuscipit recusandae consequuntur expedita et cum\nreprehenderit molestiae ut ut quas totam\nnostrum rerum est autem sunt rem eveniet architecto"
  },
  {
    "userId": 1,
    "id": 2,
    "title": "qui est esse",
    "body": "est rerum tempore vitae\nsequi sint nihil reprehenderit dolor beatae ea dolores neque\nfugiat blanditiis voluptate porro vel nihil molestiae ut reiciendis\nqui aperiam non debitis possimus qui neque nisi nulla"
  },
  ...
]

Again the key here is to select the recurring pattern first. In this case, it is "id": and then selecting all occurrences of that. Once all occurrences are selected, we can select the whole line and extract that out. Repeat the same to remove the id text. Then follow the same steps we used to combine text.

Hope this helps you to extract data from large text files.