Batch Text Replacement

Question

I need a tool that can open a text file and replace characters in a list with other characters in a list.

For example:

Lets say I have a list of "aA", "aB", and want to replace "aA" with "AA".

What is a software program that could do this easily?

Virtually any scripting language can handle this easily: AutoIt, Python, Perl, etc.
I tried this with python but the logic has not been working properly so now I need a tool.
Try notepad++, you can do batch string replacement over many files: makeuseof.com/tag/…, or you can post your Python code and have a mod move this over to StackOverflow.com and they will help you out there.

psusi · Answer 1 · 2011-08-21 19:11:28Z

up vote 4 down vote

This is exactly what the sed program was made for.

answered Aug 21 '11 at 19:11

psusi
2,568310

	well, if he means change lowercase chars to uppercase, then perhaps not so easy with sed. if he means just changing some specifics, like aA to AA, then yes. – barlop Aug 21 '11 at 19:25
	Or `ex`. Or indeed `tr` if using `sed` to change case is seen as hard (which, with GNU `sed` at least, it really isn't). – JdeBP Aug 24 '11 at 0:00

Joe Internet · Answer 2 · 2011-08-21 19:24:09Z

As a Perl one-liner, to replicate sed functionality...

perl -pe " s/aA/AA/g; s/aB/AB/g; " < input.txt > output.txt

This will turn this input.txt...

aA, aA, aA, aA, aA
aB, aB, aB, aB, aB

into this output.txt...

AA, AA, AA, AA, AA
AB, AB, AB, AB, AB

It does this through regular expression substitution...

s(ubstitute)/this-original-string/with-this-new-string/g(lobally)

2 Answers