Plain text is everywhere — server logs, build or run logs, markdown documents, JSON files.
All of these contain valuable structured data that is difficult to get and work with in a text editor.
Rex Tables is a pipeline that feeds your plain text through a smart regular expression and shows your data in an adhoc, interactive table with powerful filters.
Oh... and if you really crave power, you can query the resulting table with raw SQL too!
A single regex can quickly fetch the list of test names, their status and duration out of a log file. Once you have those as tabular data complex task become a breeze:
Once you have your data in a table that unlocks a lot of potential for power users — switch to SQL filtering and the convenient UI is replaced by an SQL editor where you query for exactly what you need.
WHERE clauses.ORDER BY and filter with LIMIT.random() to spice up your queries.
This is a power tool available via a one-time purchase that includes minor updates. Price tag TBD.
Any plain text format can be opened. Rex Tables doesn't "understand" the contents of the file, it just uses your regex to grab useful pieces of text.
Yes, this is how you say what are the pieces of data you are interested in. That said, if you have an idea for a better way than regex, do let us know.
You can use either the UI that makes filtering and sorting quite easy without any usage of SQL. Should you prefer using SQL that's an option too.
It's difficult to say how big of a market such a niche tool has but some of the ideas on the feature list are: opening folders of files, accepting streaming logs, connecting to web servers and more.