edit_file, edit_file_lines

Uri Guttman uri at StemSystems.com
Sun May 15 06:31:24 BST 2011


Hi all,

Have you ever wanted to use perl -pi inside perl? Did you have the guts
to localize $^I and @ARGV to do that? Now you can do that with a simple
call to edit_file or edit_file_lines in the new .018 release of
File::Slurp. Now you can modify a file in place with a simple call.

edit_file reads a whole file into $_, calls its code block argument and
writes $_ back out the file. These groups are equivalent operations:

	perl -0777 -pi -e 's/foo/bar/g' filename

	use File::Slurp qw( edit_file ) ;

	edit_file { s/foo/bar/g } 'filename' ;

	edit_file sub { s/foo/bar/g }, 'filename' ;

	edit_file \&replace_foo, 'filename' ;
	sub replace_foo { s/foo/bar/g }

edit_file_lines reads a whole file and puts each line into $_, calls its
code block argument and writes each $_ back out the file. These groups are
equivalent operations:

	perl -pi -e '$_ = "" if /foo/' filename

	use File::Slurp qw( edit_file_lines ) ;

	edit_file_lines { $_ = '' if /foo/ } 'filename' ;

	edit_file_lines sub { $_ = '' if /foo/ }, 'filename' ;

	edit_file \&delete_foo, 'filename' ;
	sub delete_foo { $_ = '' if /foo/ }

So now when someone asks for a simple way to modify a file from inside
Perl, you have an easy answer to give them.

-- 
Uri Guttman  ------  uri at stemsystems.com  --------  http://www.sysarch.com --
-----  Perl Code Review , Architecture, Development, Training, Support ------
---------  Gourmet Hot Cocoa Mix  ----  http://bestfriendscocoa.com ---------


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