Question

I’m looking for a script to search a file (or list of files) for a pattern and, if found, replace that pattern with a given value.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

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