I'm facing issues while trying to use the search n replace option in perl.
This is not an issue in the unix but appears only in windows. I'm using variable to search a file and replace it with desired string.
Also I'm using it in a one liner in a perl script, so it just adds to the problem!
$oldstring = 1234;
$newstring = 6789;
system("perl -pi.back e s/$oldstring/$newstring/g $filename");
I'm retrieving the file names in a directory from an array and passing them as input to the one-liner. There seems to be no change in the output files, but it does not report any warnings or failures either.
I tried the following too,
system("perl -pi.back e 's/$oldstring/$newstring/g' $filename");
Why is the search n replace not working as expected?
You need appropriate quoting for system() and for command line,
system(qq(perl -pi.back -e "s/$oldstring/$newstring/g" $filename));
or use simpler and more efficient system without calling shell,
system("perl", "-pi.back", "-e", "s/$oldstring/$newstring/g", $filename);
Related
I am working on creating some training material where I am using perl. One of the things I want to do is have the scripts be set up for the student correctly, regardless of where they extra the compressed files. I am working on a Windows batch file that will copy the perl templates to the working location and then update path in the copy of the perl template files to the correct location. The perl template have this as the first line:
#!_BASE_software/perl/bin/perl.exe
The batch file looks like this:
SET TRAINING=%~dp0
copy %TRAINING%\template\*.pl %TRAINING%work
%TRAINING%software\perl\bin\perl -pi.bak -e 's/_BASE_/%TRAINING%/g' %TRAINING%work\*.pl
I have a few problems with this:
Perl doesn't seem to like the wildcard in the filename
It turns out that %TRAINING% is going to expand into a string with backslashes which need to be converted into forwardslashes and needs to be escaped within the regex.
How do I fix this?
First of all, Windows doesn't use the shebang line, so I'm not sure why you're doing any of this work in the first place.
Perl will read the shebang line and look for options if perl is found in the path, even on Windows, but that means that #!perl is sufficient if you want to pass options via the shebang line (e.g. #!perl -n).
Now, it's possible that you use Cygwin, MSYS or some other unix emulation instead of Windows to run the program, but you are placing a Windows path in the shebang line (C:...) rather than a unix path, so that doesn't make sense either.
There are three additional problems with the attempt:
cmd uses double-quotes for quoting.
cmd doesn't perform wildcard expansion like sh, so it's up to your program do it.
You are trying to generate Perl code from cmd. ouch.
If we go ahead, we get:
"%TRAINING%software\perl\bin\perl" -MFile::DosGlob=glob -pe"BEGIN { #ARGV = map glob, #ARGV; $base = $ENV{TRAINING} =~ s{\\}{/}rg } s/_BASE_/$base/g" -i.bak -- %TRAINING%work\*.pl
If we add line breaks for readability, we get the following (that cmd won't accept):
"%TRAINING%software\perl\bin\perl"
-MFile::DosGlob=glob
-pe"
BEGIN {
#ARGV = map glob, #ARGV;
$base = $ENV{TRAINING} =~ s{\\}{/}rg
}
s/_BASE_/$base/g
"
-i.bak -- %TRAINING%work\*.pl
I am trying to do a sed operation like this
sed -i '100s/abc/xyz/' filename.txt
I wanted 100 in a variable say $var from a perl script. So, I am trying like this
system("sed -i "${vars}s/abc/xyz/" filename.txt").
This is throwing some error.
Again when I am doing like this putting system command in single quotes:
system('sed -i "${vars}s/abc/xyz/" filename.txt')
this is substituting wrongly. What can be done?
Better and safer is to use the LIST variant of system, because it avoids unsafe shell command line parsing. The command, sed in your case, will receive the command line arguments un-alterated and without the need to quote them.
NOTE: I added -MO=Deparse just to illustrate what the one-liner compiles to.
NOTE: I added -e to be on the safe side as you have -i on the command line which expects a parameter.
$ perl -MO=Deparse -e 'system(qw{sed -i -e}, "${vars}s/abc/xyz/", qw{filename.txt})'
system(('sed', '-i', '-e'), "${vars}s/abc/xyz/", 'filename.txt');
-e syntax OK
Of course in reality it would be easier just to do the processing in Perl itself instead of calling sed...
Shelling out to sed from within perl is a road to unnecessary pain. You're introducing additional quoting and variable expansion layers, and that's at best making your code less clear, and at worst introducing bugs accidentally.
Why not just do it in native perl which is considerably more effective. Perl even allows you to do in place editing if you want.
But it's as simple as:
open ( my $input, '<', 'filename.txt');
open ( my $output, '>', 'filename.txt.new');
select $output;
while ( <$input> ) {
if ( $. == $vars ) {
s/abc/xyz/
}
print;
}
Or if you're really keen on the in place edit, you can look into setting `$^I:
Perl in place editing within a script (rather than one liner)
But I'd suggest 'just' renaming the file after you're done is as easy.
I'm fairly new to the whole coding game, and am very grateful for every answer!
I am working on a directory with many .txt files in them and have a file with looong list of regex like "perl -p -i -e 's/\n\n/\n/g' *.xml" they all work if I copy them to terminal. But is there a possibility to run them straight from the file?
I tried ./unicode.sh but that resulted in:
No such file or directory.
Any ideas?
Thank you so much!
Here's a (mostly) equivalent Perl script to the oneliner perl -p -i -e 's/\n\n/\n/g' *.xml (one main difference being that this has strict and warnings enabled, which is strongly recommended), which you could expand upon by putting more code to modify the current line in the body of the while loop.
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use warnings;
use strict;
if (!#ARGV) { # if no files on command line
#ARGV = glob('*.xml'); # get a default list of files
}
local $^I = ''; # enable inplace editing (like perl -i)
while (<>) { # read each line of each file into $_
s/\n\n/\n/g; # modify $_ with a regex
# more regexes here...
print; # write the line $_ back out
}
You can save this script in a file such as process.pl, and then run it with perl process.pl, or do chmod u+x process.pl and then run it via ./process.pl.
On the other hand, you really shouldn't modify XML files with regular expressions, there are lots of Perl modules to do XML processing - I wrote about that some more here. Also, in the example you showed, s/\n\n/\n/g actually won't have any effect, since when reading files line-by-line, no string will contain two \n's (you can change how Perl reads files, but I don't see any mention of that in the question).
Edit: You've named the script in your example unicode.sh - if you're processing Unicode files, then Perl has very powerful features to help with that, although the code won't necessarily end up as nice and short as I've showed above. You'll have to tell us some more about what you're doing, and show some example input and output, to get suggestions about that. See also e.g. perlunitut.
It's likely if you got no such file or directory, your problem was you forgot to make unicode.sh executable, as in chmod +x unicode.sh, assuming that's a script that you wrote.
Of course the normal way to run multiple perl commands is this thing that looks like runme.pl which you write, i.e., a perl script.
That said, yes, everything will work from the terminal, you just need to be careful about escaping that bash performs.
I have been using grepWin for general searching of files, and wingrep when I want to do replacements or what-have-you.
GrepWin has an extensive implementation of regular expressions, however doesn't do replacements (as mentioned above).
Wingrep does replacements, however has a severely limited range of regular expression implementation.
Does anyone know of any (preferably free) grep tools for windows that does replacement AND has a reasonable implementation of regular expressions?
Thanks in advance.
I think perl at the command line is the answer you are looking for. Widely portable, powerful regex support.
Let's say that you have the following file:
foo
bar
baz
quux
you can use
perl -pne 's/quux/splat!/' -i /tmp/foo
to produce
foo
bar
baz
splat!
The magic is in Perl's command line switches:
-e: execute the next argument as a perl command.
-n: execute the command on every line
-p: print the results of the command, without issuing an explicit
'print' statement.
-i: make substitutions in place. overwrite the document with the
output of your command... use with caution.
I use Cygwin quite a lot for this sort of task.
Unfortunately it has the world's most unintuitive installer, but once it's installed correctly it's very usable... well apart from a few minor issues with copy and paste and the odd issue with line-endings.
The good thing is that all the tools work like on a real GNU system, so if you're already familiar with Linux or similar, you don't have to learn anything new (apart from how to use that crazy installer).
Overall I think the advantages make up for the few usability issues.
If you are on Windows, you can use vbscript (requires no downloads). It comes with regex. eg change "one" to "ONE"
Set objFS=CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set objArgs = WScript.Arguments
strFile = objArgs(0)
Set objFile = objFS.OpenTextFile(strFile)
strFileContents = objFile.ReadAll
Set objRE = New RegExp
objRE.Global = True
objRE.IgnoreCase = False
objRE.Pattern = "one"
strFileContents = objRE.Replace(strFileContents,"ONE") 'simple replacement
WScript.Echo strFileContents
output
C:\test>type file
one
two one two
three
C:\test>cscript //nologo test.vbs file
ONE
two ONE two
three
You can read up vbscript doc to learn more on using regex
I am trying to open a file in c++ and the server the progam in running on is based on tux.
string filename = "../dir/input.txt"; works but
string filename = "~jal/dir1/dir/input.txt"; fails
Is there any way to open a file in c++ when the filename provided is in the second format?
The ~jal expansion is performed by the shell (bash/csh/whatever), not by the system itself, so your program is trying to look into the folder named ~jal/, not /home/jal/.
I'm not a C coder, but getpwent() may be what you need.
You could scan the string, replacing ~user by the appropriate directory.
The POSIX function wordexp does that, and a few other things
variable substitution, like you can use $HOME
optional command substitution, like $(echo foo) (can be disabled)
arithmetic expansion, like $((3+4))
word splitting, like splitting ~/a ~/b into two words
wildcard expansion, like *.cpp
and quoting, like "~/a ~/b" remains that
Here is a ready piece of code, that performs this task:
How do I expand `~' in a filename like the shell does?