how to replace a character INSIDE the text content of many files automatically?

Question

I have a folder /myfolder containing many latex tables.

I need to replace a character in each of them, namely replacing any minus sign -, by an en dash –.

Just to be sure: we are replacing hypens INSIDE all of the tex file in that folder. I dont care about the tex file names.

Doing that manually would be a nightmare (too many files, too many minuses). Is there a way to loop over the files automatically and do the replacement? A solution in Python/R would be great.

Thanks!

Answer 1

sed -i -e 's/-/–/g' /myfolder/* should work.

The expression does a search globally and replaces all - inside the files the shell expands from /myfolder/* with –. Sed does the change in-place, that is, overwriting the original file (you need to explicitly specify a backup-file on MacOS, I can't remember the parameter though).

Absolutely no care is taken about wether or not the - is a verbatim hyphen or part of the latex syntax. Be aware of that.