If you've had your logging turned on from the
time you created your character, you can extract a list of
discoveries that you've made on that character. It will only
list the ones that gave you experience, but that's what you want,
right? This will work even if you've periodically renamed your
log file so it doesn't grow too big. You'll have to perform
this process on each log file you have and then merge the results.
If you have one large log file, you might have to cut it into
smaller pieces.
First, you have to have a text search utility
installed. It can't be just any one, but one that lists the
line number at the beginning of each line that registers a match. The
one I use is called Windows Grep
and you can download it from that link. It's free.
You'll also need a good word processor, one with allows Replace,
Sort, and Converting from Text to Table and back again.
Microsoft Word works fine.
For each log file or subfile, run Grep and
search for two text strings, "You have entered" and "You have
discovered". Since you have to run Grep for each of them,
you'll have two different output files. Open each file and
delete extra lines at the beginning and end. The file that results
from the "You have entered" search lists the zone you are in, even
when you first log in. The second file lists all your
discoveries. Merge them with your word processor.
What you want to do now is to sort the lines
of text by the number at the beginning of the line, so that
discoveries are listed below the text that lists the zone they're
in. However, you can't do a sort yet, because the numbers have
different lengths, and a sort will sort them as if they were
alphanumeric, not numbers. (An alphanumeric sort will list
10 before 9, which is not what you want.) To do this, select
the entire file (Control-A) and use the Convert Text to Table
command. Make sure you select Colon (:) under Separate Text
at... You'll get a table with the line number in the first
column and several more columns. You can delete all except the
first and fourth columns, which contain the information you need.
Now, with the entire table selected, use the
Sort command. Select Sort by Column 1. Make sure that
the sort is being done by Number, not Text. Delete the first
column and convert the table back to text. You'll now have a
chronologically sorted
text file of zones you've entered and discoveries you've made.
This part you have to do by hand, but it's
quick. Scan down the lines and text and delete any line
starting with "You have entered" that DOESN'T have a line starting
with "You have discovered" right after it. You're
deleting zones you
entered but didn't discover anything in. Now, use Replace to
replace "You have entered" with nothing (null string). This will move all
the zone names to the left margin. Use the Replace command
again to replace "You have discovered" with a Tab character.
You now have a text file with lists of zones and discoveries under
them, indented with a Tab.
However, this isn't quite what you want, as
zones can appear multiple times throughout the file. What you
want is a list sorted by zone name. Select the entire file and
use Replace to replace Paragraph Mark - Tab with just Tab. In
Word, you have to click More and use the Special Character pulldown menu to get the Paragraph Mark and Tab characters into the
proper text boxes. This gives you a list where each line has
the zone name at the beginning and all the discoveries in the zone after
it, separated by Tabs. Now select the entire file and use Sort
to sort each line by the zone name. This gives you an alphabetical
list by zone name, though each zone may appear more than once.
Not to worry, just use the Replace command
to replace all
Tab characters with Paragraph Mark - Tab. Scan through the
file and look for places where the zone name appears more than once
in succession. Delete any after the first one. You now
have an alphabetical list of zones and the discoveries in those
zones.
Happy discovery hunting!
