Question

I have about 50 templates, and I would like to standardize whitespace on variables as follows —

Inputs: {{variable}}, {{ something  }}, {{  test  }}, etc.
Output: {{ variable }}, {{ something }}, {{ test }} # one space within inner bracket

How would I do this find and replace to all files within myproject/templates ? Thank you.

Answer 1

find /myproject/templates -type f | xargs sed -i 's/{{\s*\(\S*\)\s*}}/{{ \1 }}/g'

Translation:

find /myprojects/templates -type f will find all items in /myproject/templates that are regular files (as opposed to symlinks or directories).

xargs sed -i s/FIND/REPLACE/g' will execute sed to edit each file in place (that is, it will replace the contents of the file with the edited version). It will search for the pattern FIND and replace it with REPLACE globally (that is, everywhere it appears on the line).

The components of the FIND pattern:

{{\s* = two open-braces followed by zero or more whitespace characters

\(\S*\) = any non-whitespace characters. (This means your variable names cannot contain internal spaces.) The escaped parens will save those characters (which are your variable names) for use in the REPLACE pattern.

\s*}} = zero or more whitespace characters followed by two close-braces.

The components of the REPLACE pattern are two open-braces, a single space, the variable name we saved using \(\S*\), another space, and the two close-braces.

Hope that helps!