Remove certain characters from several files - ruby

Question

I want to remove the following characters from several files in a folder. What I have so far is this:
str.delete! '!##$%^&*()
which I think will work to remove the characters. What do I need to do to make it run through all the files in the folder?

Answer 1

You clarified your question, stating you want to remove certain characters from the contents of files in a directory. I created a straight forward way to traverse a directory (and optionally, subdirectories) and remove specified characters from the file contents. I used String#delete like you started with. If you want to remove more advanced patterns you might want to change it to String#gsub with regular expressions.
The example below will traverse a tmp directory (and all subdirectories) relative to the current working directory and remove all occurrences of !, $, and # inside the files found. You can of course also pass the absolute path, e.g., C:/some/dir. Notice I do not filter on files, I assume it's all text files in there. You can of course add a file extension check if you wish.
def replace_in_files(dir, chars, subdirs=true)
Dir[dir + '/*'].each do |file|
if File.directory?(file) # Traverse inner directories if subdirs == true
replace_in_files(file, chars, subdirs) if subdirs
else # Replace file contents
replaced = File.read(file).delete(chars)
File.write(file, replaced)
end
end
end
replace_in_files('tmp', '!$#')

Answer 2

I think this might work, although I'm a little shaky on the Dir class in Ruby.
Dir.foreach('/path/to/dir') do |file|
file.delete '!##$%^&*()
end
There's a more general version of your question here: Iterate through every file in one directory
Hopefully a more thorough answer will be forthcoming but maybe this'll get you where you need.

Answer 3

Dir.foreach('filepath') do |f|
next if Dir.exists?(f)
file = File.new("filepath/#{f}",'r+')
text = file.read.delete("'!##$%^&*()")
file.rewind
file.write(text)
file.close
end
The reason you can't do
file.write(file.read.delete("'!##$%^&*()"))
is that file.read leaves the "cursor" at the end of the text. Instead of writing over the file, you would be appending to the file, which isn't what you want.
You could also add a method to the File class that would move the cursor to the beginning of the file.
class File
def newRead
data = self.read
self.rewind
data
end
end
Dir.foreach('filepath') do |f|
next if Dir.exists?(f)
file = File.new("filepath/#{f}",'r+')
file.write(file.newRead.delete("'!##$%^&*()"))
file.close
end