Python - Way to recursively find and replace string in text files

Question

I want to recursively search through a directory with subdirectories of text files and replace every occurrence of {$replace} within the files with the contents of a multi line string. How can this be achieved with python?

[EDIT]

So far all I have is the recursive code using os.walk to get a list of files that are required to be changed.

import os
import sys
fileList = []
rootdir = "C:\\test"
for root, subFolders, files in os.walk(rootdir):
  if subFolders != ".svn":
    for file in files:
      fileParts = file.split('.')
      if len(fileParts) > 1:
        if fileParts[1] == "php":
          fileList.append(os.path.join(root,file))


print fileList

Answer 1

os.walk is great. However, it looks like you need to filer file types (which I would suggest if you are going to walk some directory). To do this, you should add import fnmatch.

import os, fnmatch
def findReplace(directory, find, replace, filePattern):
    for path, dirs, files in os.walk(os.path.abspath(directory)):
        for filename in fnmatch.filter(files, filePattern):
            filepath = os.path.join(path, filename)
            with open(filepath) as f:
                s = f.read()
            s = s.replace(find, replace)
            with open(filepath, "w") as f:
                f.write(s)

This allows you to do something like:

findReplace("some_dir", "find this", "replace with this", "*.txt")

Answer 2

Check out os.walk:

import os
replacement = """some
multi-line string"""
for dname, dirs, files in os.walk("some_dir"):
    for fname in files:
        fpath = os.path.join(dname, fname)
        with open(fpath) as f:
            s = f.read()
        s = s.replace("{$replace}", replacement)
        with open(fpath, "w") as f:
            f.write(s)

The above solution has flaws, such as the fact that it opens literally every file it finds, or the fact that each file is read entirely into memory (which would be bad if you had a 1GB text file), but it should be a good starting point.

You also may want to look into the re module if you want to do a more complex find/replace than looking for a specific string.

Answer 3

For those using Python 3.5+ you can now use a glob recursively with the use of ** and the recursive flag.

Here's an example replacing hello with world for all .txt files:

for filepath in glob.iglob('./**/*.txt', recursive=True):
    with open(filepath) as file:
        s = file.read()
    s = s.replace('hello', 'world')
    with open(filepath, "w") as file:
        file.write(s)

Answer 4

To avoid recursing into .svn directories, os.walk() allows you to change the dirs list inplace. To simplify the text replacement in a file without requiring to read the whole file in memory, you could use fileinput module. And to filter filenames using a file pattern, you could use fnmatch module as suggested by @David Sulpy:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from __future__ import print_function
import fnmatch
import os
from fileinput import FileInput

def find_replace(topdir, file_pattern, text, replacement):
    for dirpath, dirs, files in os.walk(topdir, topdown=True):
        dirs[:] = [d for d in dirs if d != '.svn'] # skip .svn dirs
        files = [os.path.join(dirpath, filename)
                 for filename in fnmatch.filter(files, file_pattern)]
        for line in FileInput(files, inplace=True):
            print(line.replace(text, replacement), end='')

find_replace(r"C:\test", "*.php", '{$replace}', "multiline\nreplacement")