Practical guides, how-tos and comparisons to get the most out of our free online tools.
This is grep for people who do not use grep, with one important difference: the match is a plain substring, so a real regular expression returns an empty box and no error. Every claim here was checked by running the tool.
Daniel Okonkwo · 11 min read
Two lines that look identical are often not identical. Case, a trailing space, a no-break space and two different encodings of the same accented letter were each run through the duplicate finder, and it reported no duplicates for three of the four.
Daniel Okonkwo · 11 min read
A paste carries characters you cannot see: no-break spaces, soft hyphens, zero-width spaces, tabs and CRLF. Four cleanup tools were run against each of them, and they use three different definitions of whitespace.
Daniel Okonkwo · 12 min read
The encryption is the easy half. Here is exactly what the browser tool does to your file — cipher, key derivation, salt, nonce — and why an encrypted attachment with the passphrase in the same thread protects nothing at all.
Daniel Okonkwo · 12 min read
A comma is quoted, a quotation mark is doubled, and a two-line cue keeps both lines — verified byte-identical over three consecutive round trips. What can still change your file is the spreadsheet in the middle.
Daniel Okonkwo · 12 min read
Cue 12 of the English track is not cue 12 of the French one, because translators split and join sentences differently. Two strategies exist for pairing them; this merger uses neither — it interleaves. Here is what that gives you and when it is good enough.
Daniel Okonkwo · 15 min read
Removing the numbers and the timestamps is the easy half. The half that decides whether the transcript is readable is the italic tags, the dialogue dashes, the sound descriptions and the sentences broken across two cues — and this converter leaves every one of them for you.
Daniel Okonkwo · 13 min read
Measure the offset at two points instead of guessing it once. If it is constant, one shift fixes the file. If it grows, it is a frame-rate mismatch — 25 fps against 23.976 drifts 2.5625 seconds every minute — and no shift will ever fix that.
Daniel Okonkwo · 15 min read
Luhn is a checksum for catching typos, patented in 1960, and that is its entire job. A number that passes it tells you nothing about any account. For testing a payment integration you need your processor's published numbers, not a generated one.
Daniel Okonkwo · 15 min read
Swapping names for identifiers does not take a database out of the GDPR — Article 4(5) and Recital 26 say so directly. Genuinely synthetic data is outside the Regulation altogether. That single distinction decides how you seed a staging environment.
Daniel Okonkwo · 16 min read
Whether a drawn signature is valid is settled elsewhere. What decides whether your document actually gets signed is the order you ask people in, what the audit trail records, and six failure modes that have nothing to do with the law.
Daniel Okonkwo · 18 min read
Score both wrappers on the same rows and the pension plan wins the arithmetic at almost every horizon and almost every combination of tax rates — including when the rate does not fall at all. Which is exactly why the deduction is the wrong thing to decide on.
Camille Laurent · 17 min read