Edit all files in directory tree with regular expression on Windows - regex

Question

I am looking for a program that can edit all files in directory tree like Perl on Unix systems. The files are xml's and another folders.
The regex should delete all the content placed in <loot></loot> brackets.
for example file
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<monster name="Dragon"/>
<health="10000"/>
<immunities>
<immunity fire="1"/>
</immunities>
<loot>
<item id="1"/>
<item id="3"/>
<inside>
<item id="6"/>
</inside>
</item>
</loot>
the file should look after edit:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<monster name="Dragon"/>
<health="10000"/>
<immunities>
<immunity fire="1"/>
</immunities>
<loot>
</loot>

Answer 1

I would shy away from anything regex based - XML simply doesn't work with regular expressions.
But fortunately, Perl for Windows is readily available. And better yet, if you go with Strawberry perl, it comes bundled with both XML::Twig and XML::LibXML.
At which point the problem becomes inanely simple:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use File::Find::Rule;
use XML::Twig;
sub delete_loot {
my ( $twig, $loot ) = #_;
foreach my $loot_entry ( $loot -> children ) {
$loot_entry -> delete;
}
$twig -> flush;
}
my $twig = XML::Twig -> new ( pretty_print => 'indented',
twig_handlers => { 'loot' => \&delete_loot ,
'_all_' => sub { $_ - > flush } } );
foreach my $file ( File::Find::Rule -> file()
-> name ( '*.xml.txt' )
-> in ( 'C:\tmp' ) ) {
print "Processing $file\n";
$twig -> parsefile_inplace($file);
}
Of course, this also assumes that your XML is, in fact, XML - which your example isn't. If that example is actually correct, then you should really hit whoever wrote it around the head with a rolled up copy of the XML Spec whilst chanting 'don't make fake XML'.