Custom Cleaner Editor
What is a Custom Cleaner?
A custom cleaner is one or more user-defined actions that can be applied to text. For example, you can use a “Find and Replace” text action to set up an automated find and replace on given text. This action can include regular expressions, a powerful text matching syntax. Another example might be to apply another cleaner (either built-in or custom), and then add additional actions, allowing you to build on existing cleaners.
Text vs. Style
TextSoap supports changing both plain text and rich text. When working with rich text, the text formatting (style) of the text plays an additional role.
You can make text change actions on rich text and TextSoap will attempt to maintain the existing character styles from the original text. This means that bold words stay bold, italic words remain italic, and underlining, fonts and text color stays intact, even as the text is updated.
Additionally, TextSoap allows changing the underlying (character-level) format of the text. This is useful if you need to strip out existing styling like bold or italic, adjust the font, or size. TextSoap can perform the style changes selectively based on the underlying text.
Note: Microsoft Word text may also use Stylesheets to format it. As the macOS frameworks we rely on do not currently support RTF with stylesheets, TextSoap is unable to support maintaining them.
Editor Overview
Before getting started, a quick walk through of the new interface is in order. The custom cleaner (CC) editor has some key components.

Action toolbox : contains the list of actions available. Cleaners, which are themselves actions, are also listed here. You can choose between showing “All” actions, just core “Actions” or just “Cleaners”. And type in the filter field to quickly find the action you are looking for.
Workspace : represents your custom cleaner. Custom cleaners are composed of properties, an action list, and a data table.
Properties – contains information related to name and description of your custom cleaner. The name is used when defining groups and the description is presented in a tooltip, like those of built-in cleaners.
Action List – individual actions that specify exactly what the custom cleaner does and their order.
Data Table – a 4-column table that allows you to store any text data for use by the batch actions.
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Workspace
Within the workspace area, you specify the actions to perform on text. Grouping actions can contain other actions.
Each action contains a common header components:

Show/Hide Details : toggle showing the details of an action.
Name : type of action. You can customize this title.
Enable : you can selectively disable actions to skipped over them.
Customize title & User Notes : Allows you to customize the title of action and also add some additional notes for the particular action.
Show/Hide Block : Group actions have an additional option to show or hide their contained actions.
Basic Editing
Add : to add an action to your workspace, select and drag it from the toolbox on the left into the work area. You can also double-click it to append it to the action list (or group, if an item in a group is selected)
Remove : to remove an action, select it and select Edit > Delete. You can also use the key equivalent (delete key).
Re-order : to change the order of actions, select one or more contiguous actions and drag them to their new location.
Preview : to test your cleaner, click the preview button and choose the source.
Actions List

The workspace consists of actions added to it (either via drag-n-drop, double-click, or copy/paste). These actions fall into categories:
Core Actions : Find and Replace Text is the most common action, but other specialized actions allow you to build a customized text processing behavior.
Cleaner Actions : An action that applies an existing cleaner to the text. The cleaner may be built-in or another custom cleaner.
Grouping Actions : a special type of action which is a container for other actions. This includes, but is not limited to Conditionals.
For a closer look at core and grouping actions, see the topic Custom Cleaner Actions.
Lists Editor

Select the “Lists Editor” option in the toolbar to switch to Lists.
Lists allow you to work with a larger set of data by allowing you to look up associated data.
The table consists of rows with up to 4 columns of text. You can copy or paste tab-delimited text and use drag-n-drop to re-arrange rows.
The master list can be divided into sections. There is no real hierarchy, a section is defined as the items from the marker to the next marker (or end of list).
The batch-related actions can use these lists to process multiple find and replaces, setup hyperlinking, etc. If “All Items” is specified, then all the rows will be processed. If a specific section is specified, only those items will be used.
The Find Bar at the top of the list allows for global find and replace. Options include matching case, and limiting the search & replace to specific columns.
Review Custom Cleaner Actions to better understand how some of these core actions work with Lists.