Substitute large numbers of files according to style guide

Question

I'd like to do a wholesale reformatting of our tests, and I'm cleaning up some inconsistent capitalization. I'm thinking of using awk to do this, since sed falls a little short, and since I need lookahead for my case. Specifically, for each line in a given file, I want the following to happen:

• Look for the word it, describe, or context, followed by a space, followed by a single or double quote mark, followed by an uppercase alphabetic character.

• If there's a match, substitute the match with the lowercased version of the entire matched string, but only the matched string (don't lowercase other things on the same line).

• Don't match if the string after the single or double quote mark is one of "GET", "POST", "PUT", or "DELETE".

So, for example:

describe 'apple banana'       ----> (no change)
describe 'APPLE BANANA'       ----> describe 'aPPLE BANANA'
describe 'Apple Banana'       ----> describe 'apple Banana'
describe "Apple Banana"       ----> describe "apple Banana"
describe 'one TWO'            ----> (no change)

context 'POST BANANA'         ----> (no change)
context 'XPOST BANANA'        ----> context 'xPOST BANANA'

What awk arguments and/or other commands should I use? (It's okay with me if it requires more than one pass to do it.)

Answer 1

---

DISCLAIMER:

This solution will strip all "extra" whitespaces on the lines that are replaced. For example...:

      describe           'Apple           Banana'

...will be replaced with:

 describe 'apple Banana'

However, the "extra" whitespaces in...:

            context      "GET  BANANA"

...will not be removed.

---

Here's an example in awk as requested (please note that you can execute the command on one line. The line breaks are only for visual appeal here on Super User):

cat someTextFile.txt | awk '{ \
    if( \
        ($1=="describe" || $1=="it" || $1=="context") \
         && (substr($2,0,1)=="\"" || substr($2,0,1)=="'"'"'") \
         && !(substr($2,2,length($2)-1)=="POST" \
              || substr($2,2,length($2)-1)=="GET" \
              || substr($2,2,length($2)-1)=="PUT" \
              || substr($2,2,length($2)-1)=="DELETE") \
       ){ \
          subStr=substr($2,0,1); \
          subStr2=tolower(substr($2,2,1)); \
          restStr=substr($2,3,length($2)-1); \
          print $1" "subStr""subStr2""restStr" "$3 \
        }else{ \
          print \
        } \
     }' 

OUTPUT:

 describe 'apple banana'
 describe 'aPPLE BANANA'
 describe 'apple Banana'
 describe "apple Banana"
 describe 'one TWO'

 context 'POST BANANA'
 context 'xPOST BANANA'

EDIT: here's the command without the line breaks cat someTextFile.txt | awk '{ if( ($1=="describe" || $1=="it" || $1=="context") && (substr($2,0,1)=="\"" || substr($2,0,1)=="'"'"'") && !(substr($2,2,length($2)-1)=="POST" || substr($2,2,length($2)-1)=="GET" || substr($2,2,length($2)-1)=="PUT" || substr($2,2,length($2)-1)=="DELETE") ){ subStr=substr($2,0,1); subStr2=tolower(substr($2,2,1)); restStr=substr($2,3,length($2)-1); print $1" "subStr""subStr2""restStr" "$3}else{print}}'

If you wish to write the output to a new file, just add > output.txt at the end of the command.

If you wish to execute this on multiple files and store the result in one textfile, simply swap out cat someFile.txt with a cat command that executes on the files that you want to be formatted e.g. with cat *log* or cat $(find /some/path -name "*log*")

EDIT EDIT: Thanks a lot Scott for the feedback!