I have a horribly tedious programming task ahead that involves manually hunting and replacing a bunch of strings in a million line C++ codebase. During such horrific tasks I like to learn new tools to alleviate some of the boredom. What's something I should use and learn?
That or you could learn how to express the grammar in a parser tool. Much like type style cleaners, you would be able to fix all of it pretty much automatically without breaking the code.