Ruby beginner here!
I am aware that Ruby's File.open method has certain modes like r,w,a,r+,w+,a+ and the complimentary b. I totally understand the use of r,w and a modes. But I cannot seem to understand how to use the ones with the '+' symbol. Can anyone provide me with some links where there are examples as well as explanations for the use of it?
Can it be used to read a line and edit/replace it in place by a equal amount of content? If so, then how?
Sample data file: a.txt
aaa
bbb
ccc
ddd
Demo.rb
file = File.open "a.txt","r+"
file.each do |line|
line = line.chomp
if(line=="bbb")then
file.puts "big"
end
end
file.close
I am trying to replace "bbb" with "big" but I am getting this:-
in notepad++
aaa
bbb
big
ddd
in notepad
aaa
bbb
bigddd
snatched this documentation from another answer, so not mine, the solution is mine
r Read-only mode. The file pointer is placed at the beginning of the file. This is the default mode.
r+ Read-write mode. The file pointer will be at the beginning of the file.
w Write-only mode. Overwrites the file if the file exists. If the file does not exist, creates a new file for writing.
w+ Read-write mode. Overwrites the existing file if the file exists. If the file does not exist, creates a new file for reading and writing.
a Write-only mode. The file pointer is at the end of the file if the file exists. That is, the file is in the append mode. If the file does not exist, it creates a new file for writing.
a+ Read and write mode. The file pointer is at the end of the file if the file exists. The file opens in the append mode. If the file does not exist, it creates a new file for reading and writing.
EDIT: here the solution to your sample, most of the time the whole string is gsubbed and written back to the file but 'infile' replacing without rewriting the whole file is also possible
You should be cautious to replace with a string of the same length.
File.open('a.txt', 'r+') do |file|
file.each_line do |line|
if (line=~/bbb/)
file.seek(-line.length-3, IO::SEEK_CUR)
file.write 'big'
end
end
end
=>
aaa
big
ccc
ddd
And this is a more conventional way, though more concise then most other solutions
File.open(filename = "a.txt", "r+") { |file| file << File.read(filename).gsub(/bbb/,"big") }
EDIT2: i now realize this can still shorter
File.write(f = "a.txt", File.read(f).gsub(/bbb/,"big"))
So you are reading an entire file into a variable, then performing the
substitution, and the writing the variable's contents back to the
file. Am I right? I was looking for something kinda inline
That's the way to do it. You can alternativly use IO#readlines to read all lines into Array and then process them.
And this has been already answered:
How to search file text for a pattern and replace it with a given value
If you are woried about performance or memory usage then use the right tools for the right job. On *nix (or cygwin on windows):
sed -i -e "s/bbb/big/g" a.txt
Will do exactly what you want.
Related
I'm banging through Zed A. Shaw's learn code the hard way (Ruby) on compilr and am stuck on exercise 16.
filename = ARGV.first
target = File.open(filename, 'w')
target.truncate(target.size)
target.close()
In the console, I type
run sample.txt
This should wipe the sample.txt file, but it doesn't.
The file, sample.txt is in the same folder as the Start file.
Any clues?
Ok it's not the Ruby issue (as I expected) it's to do with how Compilr works. By running the code without having first created a sample.txt file, Compilr created the file for me by default in the content folder. So putting the uh... writable files... into the contents folder enables Compilr to write to them. Putting them all in the same folder (the script and the files) makes it not work.
I am using twitter ruby gem to fetch twitter search result. The example code from Github extracts the information from search result.I am wondering how to save the search result, which is JSON i think, to a separate JSON file.
Here is part of the example code:
results = #search.perform("$aaa", 1000)
aFile = File.new("data.txt", "w")
results.map do |status|
myStr="#{status.from_user}: #{status.text} #{status.created_at}"
aFile.write(myStr)
aFile.write("\n")
end
Is there any way to save all the search result to a separate JSON file instead of writing strings to a file?
Thanks in advance.
If you want to save to a file all you need to do is open the file, write it it, then close it:
File.open("myFileName.txt", "a") do |mFile|
mFile.syswrite("Your content here")
mFile.close
end
When you use open you will create the file if it doesn't exist.
One thing to be aware of is that there are different ways to open file, of which will determine where the program writes to. The "a" indicates that it will append everything you write to the file, to the end of the current content.
Here is some of the options:
r Read-only mode. The file pointer is placed at the beginning of the file. This is the default mode.
r+ Read-write mode. The file pointer will be at the beginning of the file.
w Write-only mode. Overwrites the file if the file exists. If the file does not exist, creates a new file for writing.
w+ Read-write mode. Overwrites the existing file if the file exists. If the file does not exist, creates a new file for reading and writing.
a Write-only mode. The file pointer is at the end of the file if the file exists. That is, the file is in the append mode. If the file does not exist, it creates a new file for writing.
a+ Read and write mode. The file pointer is at the end of the file if the file exists. The file opens in the append mode. If the file does not exist, it creates a new file for reading and writing.
So in your case, you would want to pull out the data you want to save, then write it to a file as I have shown. You can also specify file paths by doing:
File.open("/the/path/to/yourfile/myFileName.txt", "a") do |mFile|
mFile.syswrite("Your content here")
mFile.close
end
Another thing to be aware of is that open does not create directories, so you will either need to create directories yourself, or you can do it with your program. Here is a link that is helpful for file input/output:
http://www.tutorialspoint.com/ruby/ruby_input_output.htm
Hi I'm trying to read a pdf in Ruby, first of all I want to convert it into a txt. path is the path to the PDF, The point is that I get a .txt file empty, and as someone told me is a pdftotext problem, but I don't know how to fix it.
spec = path.sub(/\.pdf$/, '')
`pdftotext #{spec}.pdf`
file = File.new("#{spec}.txt", "w+")
text = []
file.readlines.each do |l|
if l.length > 0
text << l
Rails.logger.info l
end
end
file.close
What's wrong with my code? Thanks!
It's not possible to extract text from every PDF. Some PDF files use a font encoding that makes it impossible to extract text with simple tools such as pdftotext (and some PDF files are even completely immune to direct text extraction with any tool known to me -- in these cases you'll have to apply OCR first to have a chance to extract text...).
So if you test your code with the same "weird" PDF file all the time, it may well happen that you're getting frustrated over your code while in reality the fault lies with the PDF.
First make sure that the commandline usage of pdftotxt works well with a given PDF, then test (and develop further) your code with that PDF.
The problem is you are opening the file in write ("w") mode, whuch truncates the file. You can see a table of file modes and what they mean at http://ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/IO.html.
Try something like this, it uses a pdftotext option to send the text to stdout to avoid creating a temporary file and uses blocks for more idiomatic ruby.
text = `pdftotext #{path} -`
text.split.select { |line|
line.length > 0
}.each { |line|
Rails.logger.info(line)
}
You would need to open the txt file with write permission.
file = File.new("#{spec}.txt", "w")
You could consult How to create a file in Ruby
Update: your code is not complete and looks buggy.
Cant say what is path
Looks like you are trying to read the text file to which you intend to write file.readlines.each
spell check length you have it l.lenght
You may want to paste the actual code.
Check this gist https://gist.github.com/4160587
As mentioned, your code is not working because you are reading and writing to the same file.
Example
Ruby code file_write.rb to do the file write operation
pdf_file = File.open("in.txt")
output_file = File.open("out.txt", "w") # file to which you want to write
#iterate over input file and write the content to output file
pdf_file.readlines.each do |l|
output_file.puts(l)
end
output_file.close
pdf_file.close
Sample txt file in.txt
Some text in file
Another line of text
1. Line 1
2. Not really line 2
Once your run file_write.rb you should see new file called out.txt with same content as in.txt You could change the content of input file if you want. In your case you would use pdf reader to get the content and write it to the text file. Basically first line of the code will change.
I am really new to Ruby and could use some help with a program. I need to open a zip file that contains multiple text files that has many rows of data (eg.)
CDI|3|3|20100515000000|20100515153000|2008|XXXXX4791|0.00|0.00
CDI|3|3|20100515000000|20100515153000|2008|XXXXX5648|0.00|0.00
CHO|3|3|20100515000000|20100515153000|2114|XXXXX3276|0.00|0.00
CHO|3|3|20100515000000|20100515153000|2114|XXXXX4342|0.00|0.00
MITR|3|3|20100515000000|20100515153000|0000|XXXXX7832|0.00|0.00
HR|3|3|20100515000000|20100515153000|1114|XXXXX0238|0.00|0.00
I first need to extract the zip file, read the text files located in the zip file and write only the complete rows that start with (CDI and CHO) to two output files, one for the rows of data starting with CDI and one for the rows of data starting with CHO (basically parsing the file). I have to do it with Ruby and possibly try to set the program to an auto function for arrival of continuous zip files of the same stature. I completely appreciate any advice, direction or help via some sample anyone can give.
One means is using the ZipFile library.
require 'zip/zip'
# To open the zip file and pass each entry to a block
Zip::ZipFile.foreach(path_to_zip) do |text_file|
# Read from entry, turn String into Array, and pass to block
text_file.read.split("\n").each do |line|
if line.start_with?("CDI") || line.start_with?("CHO")
# Do something
end
end
end
I'm not sure if I entirely follow your question. For starters, if you're looking to unzip files using Ruby, check out this question. Once you've got the file unzipped to a readable format, you can try something along these lines to print to the two separate outputs:
cdi_output = File.open("cdiout.txt", "a") # Open an output file for CDI
cho_output = File.open("choout.txt", "a") # Open an output file for CHO
File.open("text.txt", "r") do |f| # Open the input file
while line = f.gets # Read each line in the input
cdi_output.puts line if /^CDI/ =~ line # Print if line starts with CDI
cho_output.puts line if /^CHO/ =~ line # Print if line starts with CHO
end
end
cdi_output.close # Close cdi_output file
cho_output.close # Close cho_output file
I have a text file that contains some numbers and I want to search a specific number then delete that line. This is the content of the file
83087
308877
214965
262896
527530
So if I want to delete 262896, I will open the file, search for the string and delete that line.
You need to open a temporary file to write lines you want to keep.
something along the lines like this should do it :
require 'fileutils'
require 'tempfile'
# Open temporary file
tmp = Tempfile.new("extract")
# Write good lines to temporary file
open('sourcefile.txt', 'r').each { |l| tmp << l unless l.chomp == '262896' }
# Close tmp, or troubles ahead
tmp.close
# Move temp file to origin
FileUtils.mv(tmp.path, 'sourcefile.txt')
This will run as :
$ cat sourcefile.txt
83087
308877
214965
262896
527530
$ ruby ./extract.rb
$ cat sourcefile.txt
83087
308877
214965
527530
$
You can also do it in-memory only, without a temporary file. But the memory footprint might be huge depending on your file size. The above solution only loads one line at a time in memory, so it should work fine on big files.
-- Hope it helps --