How to find and replace text in a file

Question

Read all file content. Make a replacement with String.Replace. Write content back to file.

string text = File.ReadAllText("test.txt");
text = text.Replace("some text", "new value");
File.WriteAllText("test.txt", text);

You're going to have a hard time writing to the same file you're reading from. One quick way is to simply do this:

File.WriteAllText("test.txt", File.ReadAllText("test.txt").Replace("some text","some other text"));

You can lay that out better with

string str = File.ReadAllText("test.txt");
str = str.Replace("some text","some other text");
File.WriteAllText("test.txt", str);

You need to write all the lines you read into the output file, even if you don't change them.

Something like:

using (var input = File.OpenText("input.txt"))
using (var output = new StreamWriter("output.txt")) {
  string line;
  while (null != (line = input.ReadLine())) {
     // optionally modify line.
     output.WriteLine(line);
  }
}

If you want to perform this operation in place then the easiest way is to use a temporary output file and at the end replace the input file with the output.

File.Delete("input.txt");
File.Move("output.txt", "input.txt");

(Trying to perform update operations in the middle of text file is rather hard to get right because always having the replacement the same length is hard given most encodings are variable width.)

EDIT: Rather than two file operations to replace the original file, better to use File.Replace("input.txt", "output.txt", null). (See MSDN.)

It is likely you will have to pull the text file into memory and then do the replacements. You will then have to overwrite the file using the method you clearly know about. So you would first:

// Read lines from source file.
string[] arr = File.ReadAllLines(file);

YOu can then loop through and replace the text in the array.

var writer = new StreamWriter(GetFileName(baseFolder, prefix, num));
for (int i = 0; i < arr.Length; i++)
{
    string line = arr[i];
    line.Replace("match", "new value");
    writer.WriteLine(line);
}

this method gives you some control on the manipulations you can do. Or, you can merely do the replace in one line

File.WriteAllText("test.txt", text.Replace("match", "new value"));

I hope this helps.

This is how I did it with a large (50 GB) file:

I tried 2 different ways: the first, reading the file into memory and using Regex Replace or String Replace. Then I appended the entire string to a temporary file.

The first method works well for a few Regex replacements, but Regex.Replace or String.Replace could cause out of memory error if you do many replaces in a large file.

The second is by reading the temp file line by line and manually building each line using StringBuilder and appending each processed line to the result file. This method was pretty fast.

static void ProcessLargeFile()
{
        if (File.Exists(outFileName)) File.Delete(outFileName);

        string text = File.ReadAllText(inputFileName, Encoding.UTF8);

        // EX 1 This opens entire file in memory and uses Replace and Regex Replace --> might cause out of memory error

        text = text.Replace("</text>", "");

        text = Regex.Replace(text, @"\<ref.*?\</ref\>", "");

        File.WriteAllText(outFileName, text);




        // EX 2 This reads file line by line 

        if (File.Exists(outFileName)) File.Delete(outFileName);

        using (var sw = new StreamWriter(outFileName))      
        using (var fs = File.OpenRead(inFileName))
        using (var sr = new StreamReader(fs, Encoding.UTF8)) //use UTF8 encoding or whatever encoding your file uses
        {
            string line, newLine;

            while ((line = sr.ReadLine()) != null)
            {
              //note: call your own replace function or use String.Replace here 
              newLine = Util.ReplaceDoubleBrackets(line);

              sw.WriteLine(newLine);
            }
        }
    }

    public static string ReplaceDoubleBrackets(string str)
    {
        //note: this replaces the first occurrence of a word delimited by [[ ]]

        //replace [[ with your own delimiter
        if (str.IndexOf("[[") < 0)
            return str;

        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

        //this part gets the string to replace, put this in a loop if more than one occurrence  per line.
        int posStart = str.IndexOf("[[");
        int posEnd = str.IndexOf("]]");
        int length = posEnd - posStart;


        // ... code to replace with newstr


        sb.Append(newstr);

        return sb.ToString();
    }