Question

I have a bunch of HTML files in HTML folder. Those HTML files have unicode characters which I solved by using filter(lambda x: x in string.printable, line). Now how do I write the changes back to the original file? What is the best way of doing it? Each HTML file is of 30 kb in size.

  1 import os, string
  2 
  3 for file in os.listdir("HTML/"):
  4     print file
  5     myfile = open('HTML/' + file)
  6     fileList = myfile.readlines()
  9     for line in fileList:
 10         #print line
 11         line = filter(lambda x: x in string.printable, line)
 12     myfile.close()

Answer 1

Use the fileinput module. It allows you to read and write to the same file in place:

import fileinput,sys,os
files=[os.path.join('HTML',filename) for filename in os.listdir("HTML/")]
for line in fileinput.input(files, inplace=True):    
    line = filter(lambda x: x in string.printable, line)
    sys.stdout.write(line)