Following on from the previous installment where I discussed the Mozilla Firefox browser and it's various plug-ins and extensions, this time I thought I'd give a quick run-down of the other tools I frequently use in debugging content and migration issues.

First of all, there's trusty old Textpad. Textpad is a plain-text editor and really excels at performing regular expression search as well as find-and-replace. And, with the appropriate syntax files in place, it will also do syntax highlighting of HTML, JSP, JavaScript, Python, Java files and others. (On a side note, my personal preference is to set the Textpad editor "keystroke compatability" to "Microsoft applications", but you can also select others. No vi or emacs bindings as far as I can see, though!)

Speaking of regular expressions, you can't get much better than RegexBuddy. This tool lets to edit and test your regular expressions, and even provides a visual builder to create new expressions. With it instant feedback through highlighting your test-data to match your regular expression, RegexBuddy is an invaluable tool in both teaching yourself regular expressions as well as a tweaking guide for the more experienced user.

To solve character set issues, I use SC UniPad. This allows you to quickly and easily identify the encoding type of a file as well as the Unicode id for any character contained within it. This is useful to detecting content where the encoding header doesn't match the content.

For XML and XSL work, I use Altova XMLSpy. This is a powerful XSL editor with a full XSLT Engine built in so you can perform your transformations with a simple key-press.

For comparing files (and folders) I prefer CS Diff. This visual diff tool has a handy single-pane view of the differences between the files which I find much easier to read than the traditional diff/patch output.

And finally, for viewing the Vamosa log-files while the program is running, I use BareMetalSoft BareTail. (BareMetalSoft site appears to be down at the moment, alternative download site is here.) This is a powerful Windows implementation of the standard Unix 'tail' utility, with added functionality for highlighting based on simple searches.

And there you have it - my Content Migrator's Toolbox.

Now over to you - have I misses any of your favourite tools? Do you disagree with my choices? Please add your comments below.