Question

I am new to python so excuse my ignorance.

Currently, I have a text file with some words marked as <>.

My goal is to essentially build a script which runs through a text file with such marked words. Each time the script finds such a word, it would ask the user for what it wants to replace it with.

For example, if I had a text file:

Today was a <<feeling>> day.

The script would run through the text file so the output would be:

Running script...
feeling? great
Script finished.

And generate a text file which would say:

Today was a great day.

Advice?

Edit: Thanks for the great advice! I have made a script that works for the most part like I wanted. Just one thing. Now I am working on if I have multiple variables with the same name (for instance, “I am <>. Bob is also <>.”) the script would only prompt, feeling?, once and fill in all the variables with the same name.

Thanks so much for your help again.

Answer 1

Basically the same solution as that offerred by @phihag, but in script form

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import argparse
import re
from os import path

pattern = '<<([^>]*)>>'

def user_replace(match):
    return raw_input('%s? ' % match.group(1))


def main():
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
    parser.add_argument('infile', type=argparse.FileType('r'))
    parser.add_argument('outfile', type=argparse.FileType('w'))
    args = parser.parse_args()

    matcher = re.compile(pattern)

    for line in args.infile:
        new_line = matcher.sub(user_replace, line)
        args.outfile.write(new_line)

    args.infile.close()
    args.outfile.close()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Usage: python script.py input.txt output.txt

Note that this script does not account for non-ascii file encoding.