Question

I’d like to replace a certain number say 3.54 with 3.363 in multiple .inp files and save in place.

This is what I have written so far but I don’t know where the problem is !
so I would appreciate it if someone could have a look at this.

for i in range(1, 126):
 file = 'C:/inp/' + str(i) +'.inp'
 o2 = open(name=file, readOnly=False)  
 for line in ("file"):
  file.write(line.replace('3.54', '3.363'))
 file.close()

Answer 1

The for loop:

for line in ("file"):

makes line equal to 'f', then 'i', then 'l', then 'e'.

Try

import fileinput
import sys
import re

filenames = ['C:/inp/%d.inp'%i  for i in range(1, 126)]
for line in fileinput.input(filenames, inplace = True,
                            backup = '.bak'):        
    sys.stdout.write(re.sub(r'\b3.54\b', '3.363', line))

Note that line.replace('3.54', '3.363') is a bit dangerous. It will change 13.54 to 13.363, for example. To protect against this, use regex.

References to tools used:

• fileinput module
• list comprehension (used to defined filenames)
• re.sub (regex substitution)