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A powerful API companion for handling text files

Victoria Angelova
UltraEdit and APILayer

APIs or Application Programming Interfaces are protocols that enable two software components to communicate with each other using a set of request and response prompts. This simple and ingenious mechanism has skyrocketed in use, especially with the amount of data that we collectively process on a daily basis (around 2.5M TB of data as per IBM).

And while you may not be even close to handling that amount of data, it doesn’t hurt to be prepared to face humongous files.

We’re here to talk about UltraEdit—a powerful text-editing tool that can help you handle data you pass though or get from APIs.

The Swiss Army knife of text editors

UltraEdit is a powerful, flexible, and highly configurable text-editing tool with an extensive array of data-editing features designed to meet every user’s needs.  

Through its 28 years of development, UE has become a must-have utility tool for any developer or IT professional. Some users include database admins, data analysts, security researchers, software architects, and a lot more.

UE is one of those versatile tools that fits a lot of use cases. It isn’t designed towards a specific domain in tech or engineering— it’s meant to do a lot of things well. That’s why it’s sometimes referred to as the “Swiss Army Knife” of text editors.

 

The UltraEdit and APILayer combo

JSON manager and XML viewer

The most basic yet useful benefit of having UE is that you can view and format JSON and XML files, two of the most common file formats for those working with APIs. 

UE includes a JSON manager so you can edit, format, and validate the datasets straight from the editor itself. You can also do the same with XML. You no longer need a separate pretty print tool just to read files.
XML parsing, editing, reformatting, and validation using XSD schema with UltraEdit text editor

Edit and format text files like a pro

You may be using text or data APIs to manage semantics and entries in your applications or datasets. These are powerful mechanisms that can enhance or alter text files to more preferable versions. If you need to format multiple files or large files repeatedly an editor like UltraEdit can be beneficial.

With UltraEdit you can preformat text files before using nifty tools like block mode editing to masterfully select via columns (as opposed to selecting sequentially). Combined with UE’s large file handling capabilities, you can do some serious work with huge datasets

How to use column mode in UltraEdit text editor

How to instantly open HUGE (4+ GB) text files using UltraEdit

You can also leverage the built-in scripting and macros to quickly clean up your compiled API input or output files. Here are some tasks that you can do with scripts and macros:

Use macros to automate your text editing in UltraEdit

Native FTP/SFTP browser, SSH/telnet console

UE has integrated features if you’re working with file transfer protocols. A lot of developers use cloud-based or web-based services nowadays so it’s useful to be able to transmit and work on data straight from a text editor.

Other features

Leverage these features alongside UE’s other features to get the most value. Here are a couple of things you get with UE:

Great backup editor

UE is nominally a text editor but it also comes with a suite of other tools to complement your work. UE comes with the option of the All Access bundle. It includes the following:

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