Occasionally it is necessary to add a comma to every line of text, I have found this necessary when I have a list of items which I want to turn into a large number of tags for use in Evernote. I looked around for a way to do this and worked out a very easy way of doing it using the BBEdit text editor which I use on my Mac, the process is very simple.

Starting with the text document (probably an exported list from a spreadsheet) opened in BBEdit, you have your list of items which might look something like:

Fred Bloggs

Bill Smith

Sadie Stern

Jack Jones

Archie Enemy

Simply selet all the text using either your mouse, trackpad or the cmd-a keyboard shortcut. Then in the BBEdit menu select "Text" then "Prefix/Suffix Lines" and in the pop-up that opens select the "Insert" radio button and put a comma in the suffix box and click "OK".

Hey presto it's done, a comma appears at the end of every line.

Fred Bloggs,

Bill Smith,

Sadie Stern,

Jack Jones,

Archie Enemy,

At this point I often want to convert this list into a string of text with each name, or whatever the text is, separated by a comma, I also do this using BBEdit. Simply select the text you want to convert and then select from the BBEdit menu "Text" and then "Remove Line Breaks" and you will then have a comma separated list as below.

Fred Bloggs, Bill Smith, Sadie Stern, Jack Jones, Archie Enemy,

With long lists the above simple process can save hours! When pasted into the Tags field of an Evernote note you can create any number of tags at one time, avoiding a lot of typing, and these can then be selected to be applied to other notes.