If it's text files, then Regex is still your best answer. Regex is "compiled" into a fast scan that beats a straight Find & Replace by a huge magnitude.
So your best compromise might be a VBA script in Excel. List your requirements in a worksheet, traverse the sheet and convert each one to a Regex expression (built into VBA).
I can say from experience this works well. I have done this (in VB.NET but it's similar) to extract meta data from Java programs. I had around 20 Regex statements, 8,000+ files and 16 million lines of code, it completed the task (including writing to the database) in about 24 minutes.