Last week I hand-edited 22 XML files to change one attribute in each. I had only ten minutes, and I knew that solution could be done in that time.
Today I had exactly the same task, but with less time pressure, I went hunting. Here is the solution I used:
sed -i 's/old/new/g' *.xml
-i means replace inline. I had struggled with sed years ago and thought it was a horrible monster that made emacs look user-friendly in comparison. But that is so simple. Perhaps I was hurt before by trying to do something that couldn't be described as a simple regex?
Actually I vaguely remember my need at that time was to modify all html files in a directory tree, which sed cannot do. But with find it can:
find . -iname \*.html -execdir sed -i 's/<html>/<html mytag="test">/g' {} +
That inserts an attribute in the html tag of all *.html files in current directory and its subdirectories. (Shamelessly stolen from comments on this page here, and then I did a quick test to confirm I hadn't introduce a typo.)
Cool. One step closer to unix guruness. (sed is also available in cygwin, which is where I was actually doing the edit that started this article.)
UPDATE: for an example where tr is more useful than sed see
find, grep and tr.
UPDATE: Here is an expansion of the find+sed example above. I wanted to alter three types of extensions: html, php, phtml. And I only wanted to alter those files in just certain subdirectories. The -regex parameter of find seemed to do the job:
find . -regex './\(dir1\|dir2/subdir1\|dir3\|dir4\)/.+\.\(html\|php\|phtml\)' -execdir sed -i 's/ABC/XYZ/g' {} +
That is the command exactly as you run it at the bash command prompt. Notice that, in the regex, not just (), but also | need to be prefixed with a single backslash.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
php Architect: no more print version
The subject says it all: the publishers of the excellent php|a magazine have suddenly stopped the print edition. It has gone PDF only.
(Click php|a on the right to see my other blog articles about php|a magazine.)
This is such a shame: I would willingly pay much more for a print version than a PDF version. In fact I was doing exactly that. Then a year ago they turned everyone to be Print+PDF subscribers, cut the price dramatically, and gave me free extra 12 issues to make up for the price cut. In fact that only works out as 6 or so free issues, but as they were free I can hardly complain.
It is just a shame they fiddled with their business model, as obviously the price cut made the print magazine too expensive.
Why do I prefer the print version? It can be read on the train, read in the mountains, is light and portable. It can be kept on my bookshelf, pulled off and opened on my desk while I'm coding. As an author, a print magazine is also much more impressive. It is something physical I can show a potential client, something I can show my Mum.
(Click php|a on the right to see my other blog articles about php|a magazine.)
This is such a shame: I would willingly pay much more for a print version than a PDF version. In fact I was doing exactly that. Then a year ago they turned everyone to be Print+PDF subscribers, cut the price dramatically, and gave me free extra 12 issues to make up for the price cut. In fact that only works out as 6 or so free issues, but as they were free I can hardly complain.
It is just a shame they fiddled with their business model, as obviously the price cut made the print magazine too expensive.
Why do I prefer the print version? It can be read on the train, read in the mountains, is light and portable. It can be kept on my bookshelf, pulled off and opened on my desk while I'm coding. As an author, a print magazine is also much more impressive. It is something physical I can show a potential client, something I can show my Mum.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)