Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it was trivial, by any means. Just that there are powerful tools for "manipulating many line-delimited text files at once" and tho

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it was trivial, by any means. Just that there are powerful tools for "manipulating many line-delimited text files at once" and those tools seem likely to fit your goal. It's possible you do in fact need to parse the AST for your goals - I haven't spent the requisite time to deeply understand the problem.