Replace strings in text file

REPLACEINFILE replaces characters in ASCII file using PERL

Description

Easy and efficient way to replace strings in ASCII files.
For example replace commas ',' to points '.' in large data files for easier load.

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7 (R14)
• Other requirements: Made for Windows, for other platforms edit the path to perl on line 46

[q w]

 

[Andy G]

Pretty Slick!

[Butch Walker]

Would be nice to have an option to replace 'first occurance' instead of automatically replacing all when the file has multiple matches and you dont want to replace them all. Otherwise, great script!

[Dennis M]

very nice

[John Peterson]

Very nice. Could I find a Unicode version of this?

[Oleg Komarov]

I have some problems with whitespaces, i want to replace tehm with a char, "X". but it places an "X" between every char.
ex:
20039 IAN43
replaceinfile(' ','X', myfile) --> 2X0X0X3X9X X XIXAXNX4X3
instead of 20039XXIAN43

[Oleg Komarov]

Works fine...don't know what happened :)

[boutonnet arnaud]

Very useful. One problem though: the function doesn't work if the string contains the symbol '+'

[boutonnet arnaud]

... If the string contains the 'plus' symbol

[boutonnet arnaud]

'+' is a reserved symbol for regular expressions. One needs to put a '\'in front of it and then it works !

[mark95tt]

Seems to work great overall. Couldn't get it to replace the string '//' in my ascii file, though. Get this error:

Bareword found where operator expected at -e line 1, near "%/g"
(Missing operator before g?)
syntax error at -e line 1, next token ???
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.

[McLaren]

Hello,

This may be an obvious error as I am just getting into Matlab,

when I call tthe function:
[s, msg] = replaceinfile('/', ' ', 'data.dat');

i get the error:
??? Error using ==> replaceinfile at 64
Can't do inplace edit on data.dat: File exists.

Any ideas?

I have to do several substitutions in sequence in order to be able process the data appropriately, i imagine doing this by:

[s, msg] = replaceinfile( '/' , ' ' , 'data.dat');
[s, msg] = replaceinfile( ',' , '. ' , 'data.dat');

should this work?

[McLaren]

A host of alternative errors seem to plague me method of calling the function depending on varying my reference to a space as ' ', char(32) or 'char(32)':

??? Error using ==> replaceinfile at 64
Illegal division by zero at -e line 1, <> line 1.

??? Error using ==> replaceinfile at 64
Bareword found where operator expected at -e line
1, near "s///char"
syntax error at -e line 1, near "s///char"
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.

[McLaren]

AH! It was siple, / is a special character, it should be expressed with a \ in front as per the comment above!

...for the next user

[Richard Holcombe]

This doesn't seem to work at all for me. after running the program, the directory that contained the file now has its permissions set so that I cannot access the file, or even delete the directory containing the file. I don't know what happened to the text of the file because I can't access the file.

[Doug Hull]

 

[Johannes Schaffner]

 

[Ehsan]

would be nice if there was a matlab/linux switch automatically change between

(matlabroot, 'sys\perl\win32\bin\perl')
 and
/usr/bin/perl

[Lennart van Luijk]

Works exactly like it's supposed to!

[Adi Navve]

Works great.
Just one suggestion, in case of calling the function with filenames without a full path the call fails if these files are not in the system path. How about adding support to this case by identifying it and building the path using "which" function?
Thanks for the submission.

[Fernando]

Hello everybody!

Could somebody give me some help with this file? Perhaps and example or something like that. I am running the function with the text I want to replace but is says that there are no matches for my search. Also, does the format has to be a .bak file or could it be a .txt?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Jack]

 

[ubuntu21 T]

Ehsan suggested on 02 Jan 2011 to write the code for a sort of automatical switch between different OS. In my case, I have on my computer Windows and Ubuntu 10.04 Linux, so I have replaced the line

perlCmd = sprintf('"%s"',fullfile(matlabroot, 'sys\perl\win32\bin\perl'));

with

if findstr('glnx',lower(computer))
    perlCmd = sprintf('"%s"',fullfile('/usr/bin/perl'));
else %assume it's windows otherwise
    perlCmd = sprintf('"%s"',fullfile(matlabroot, 'sys\perl\win32\bin\perl'));
end

I have only tested on Ubuntu 10.04 Linux, with positive results on a 240 MB file. It works like a charm and very fast.