Simple-RegEx

A simple command line tool to apply a regular expression search to an input file, and output the text with the matches replaced using a String.format()-style replacement string.

For example:

simple-regex '[au](ll)' 'e{0}' infile.txt

If infile.txt contains:

Hallo hullo

The program will output:

Hello hello

Install

Download and extract dist/simple-regex-0.1.0.tar.gz, or clone this repo with:

git clone https://github.com/szurcher/simple-regex.git

From the simple-regex directory, run:

python setup.py install

Built-in Help

If you run simple-regex -h you will get the following help output:

usage: simple-regex.py [-h] [-x [DEBUG]] find replace infile [outfile]

Regular expression find and replace.

positional arguments:
  find                  Pattern to use in searches.
  replace               Python format string to use for replacing matches.
  infile                File to be searched.
  outfile               File to output modified result.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -x [DEBUG], --debug [DEBUG]
                        Specify debug output level (results in regex.log)

Notes

• Use single quotes (') around find and replace patterns to avoid shell expansion.
• outfile is there for convenience. By default output is sent to STDOUT, but if you specify an outfile it will receive the text with replacements instead. infile is required as the program does not read STDIN.
• By default DEBUG level is ERROR and regex.log will be empty. If you set -x INFO you will get a lot of (probably useless) info about where the program found matches.
• The program is licensed under the BSD 2-Clause license. See the LICENSE file for details. If there is a discrepancy between the LICENSE file and this README, the LICENSE takes precedence.