How do I edit a block of text in thousands of contact records?

Question

When I imported contact data from my Treo to the iPhone via Address Book on my Mac, my custom fields got entered into the Notes field as X-Palm-Category1: <data>, X-Palm-Category2: <data>, etc. Can I do a global edit changing the text "X-Palm-Category1" to "Directions"? I have over 2000 records so I'd really like to avoid individual record edits.
Thanks.
Ken

Answer 1

I wasn't able to do it with the replace text routine common to AppleScript, so I used sed (a Unix utility) called from AppleScript:
tell application "Address Book"
repeat with thisPerson in people
if exists the note of thisPerson then
set thisNote to the note of thisPerson as string
set the note of thisPerson to (do shell script ("echo \"" & thisNote & "\" | sed 's/X-Palm-Category1/Directions/' "))
end if
end repeat
end tell
AppleScript is mighty slow, but much faster than manual.
I'm sure you can also use something like HexEdit to replace all "X-Palm-Category1" with "Directions" in the file "/Users/YOURUSERNAME/Library/Application\ Support/AddressBook/AddressBook.data", but binary files are always a little scary. Don't use a text editor to do it, it won't handle the weird bytes, even though, luckily, X-Palm-Category1 appears as is.