global search and replace

Erik Price eprice at ptc.com
Tue May 13 10:05:50 EDT 2003


Greg Rundlett wrote:

> I spent the day yesterday upgrading my Quanta Plus install (hoping the
> feature was available in the newest version), and looking online for
> various ways to do a simple text replacement across thousands of files. 
> I know that there are perl scripts that with the proper care will do
> what I want, but why isn't this feature built-in to VIM, Quanta, or
> other editors?  AFAIK, the only editor that does this on Windows is
> HomeSite.

Does jEdit offer what you are looking for?  It is the only editor I am 
familiar with other than BBEdit (which does offer what you are looking 
for and more, but is a Mac-only text editor).  jEdit offers PCRE 
regex-based search/replace and does let you run the commands across all 
files in a specified directory.

> It has been so long since I used perl, that I have to dig through my
> books and old code snippets even to find and understand the recipes that
> I come across.
> 
> How do you do this?

With Perl.

I'm not trying to be a smart-aleck, but the fact that you can combine 
powerful regex-based search/replace with conditional processing makes 
Perl a far better choice (for me) than to do multiple passes of 
search/replace with a text editor.  I don't use Perl for writing 
"software" (even though there are plenty who do), but I do use Perl for 
writing "scripts".  Its flexibility for this purpose is unrivaled, IMHO.


Good luck,

Erik




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