Combine Text Documents

Martin Brinkmann
Mar 20, 2008
Updated • Feb 12, 2013
Software, Windows
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6

My old hoster had the habit of providing me with 20 Megabyte log file chunks that I could download to my computer to analyze them locally in log processing software. I did run a great forum back then that had lots of traffic and I always had to download several log files and combine them when they were downloaded on my computer. That's one practical use for the software TxtCollector which combines text documents found in folders and subfolders that the user specifies.

The author of the software used it to combine reports that he received at work. Having one file instead of many has some advantages. It's pretty obvious for log files but it also provides a better way of handling files when you look at the report example. It is easier to search inside one document than it is to search in several documents, it's also easier to keep an overview. This can for instance be useful if you get monthly reports and want to combine them into a yearly report, or have downloaded an ebook that is separated into several files.

Using TxtCollector is not difficul. Just select a folder with text documents that you want to merge, check or uncheck the include Subfolders option, select if you want to use a separator or not and click on the Combine All Files button.

The application runs on all Windows operating systems starting with Windows 95 and including Windows Vista.

Update: The program is fully compatible with all recent versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Note that it supports a variety of plain text formats not only txt but also bat, log, csv, xml or cfg.

The latest version of the program ships with additional options that you can activate before the files are merged. You can disable carriage returns and add a space character as well.

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Comments

  1. Ian said on June 30, 2008 at 10:58 pm
    Reply

    I am having issues with this running on vista, you said above that it is compatible, but I am still having problems. It won’t install and says, “Unable to register the DLL/OCX: RegSvr32 Failed with exit code 0x3” Do any of you guys have any ideas?

    Thanks

    Ian

  2. linuxeventually said on March 21, 2008 at 12:09 am
    Reply

    So essentially this is like the Linux command
    #cat file1 file2 > mergedfiles
    but with a GUI and for Windows

  3. Martin said on March 20, 2008 at 5:01 pm
    Reply

    Roman I had that nagging thought in my head all the time telling me that I knew this program and probably wrote an article about it already. Was to lazy to look it up. As you said it’s a nice program worth mentioning and it helped Yogi :)

  4. Roman ShaRP said on March 20, 2008 at 4:59 pm
    Reply

    You already wrote about it on Ghacks. Of course, it worth be mentioned again once more ;)

    But you again forgot to mention, that it can merge HTML files too :)

  5. Yogi said on March 20, 2008 at 2:46 pm
    Reply

    Would you believe that just hours after you posted this – I found that I needed exactly this tool?

    Thanks again, Martin!

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