How to search file text for a pattern and replace it with a given value
Disclaimer: This approach is a naive illustration of Ruby's capabilities, and not a production-grade solution for replacing strings in files. It's prone to various failure scenarios, such as data loss in case of a crash, interrupt, or disk being full. This code is not fit for anything beyond a quick one-off script where all the data is backed up. For that reason, do NOT copy this code into your programs.
Here's a quick short way to do it.
file_names = ['foo.txt', 'bar.txt']
file_names.each do |file_name|
text = File.read(file_name)
new_contents = text.gsub(/search_regexp/, "replacement string")
# To merely print the contents of the file, use:
puts new_contents
# To write changes to the file, use:
File.open(file_name, "w") {|file| file.puts new_contents }
end
Actually, Ruby does have an in-place editing feature. Like Perl, you can say
ruby -pi.bak -e "gsub(/oldtext/, 'newtext')" *.txt
This will apply the code in double-quotes to all files in the current directory whose names end with ".txt". Backup copies of edited files will be created with a ".bak" extension ("foobar.txt.bak" I think).
NOTE: this does not appear to work for multiline searches. For those, you have to do it the other less pretty way, with a wrapper script around the regex.