Global Text Replacement

[Kruskal]

I'd like a simple program that would replace all occurrences of a text string with another in all files in a directory.  I've looked around and could only find far more complex utilities with far larger prices.

Bells & Whistles: Options which I could do without:

Only process files with a given extension (or extensions or matching a pattern)
Process subfolders (or not)
Ignore case (or not)

Thanks -- Vincent

[Darwin]

Advanced Find and Replace 3 should be able to tackle this (albeit for a price! It's shareware). It's got more features than you're looking for but despite being shareware it's quite cheap ($29.99) for its category.

I'm sure someone here will come along soon, though, with a free/donationware alternative...

One other thought: there is V-Grep, which is postcardware (couldn't find a link to its homepage so Snapfiles will have to do...).

[justice]

BK ReplaceM can do that you need. It takes a minute or so to understand the interface. Basically you define a group of files, then define phrases and their replacements, then you apply the operations on the group of files.

At its core, ReplaceEm is essentially a text search-and-replace program. However, unlike the search-replace functionality of a standard text editor, ReplaceEm is designed to operate on multiple files at once. And you need not only perform one search-replace operation per file -- you can setup a list of operations to perform. If different groups of files need to have different operations performed on them, this is no problem either. You can also specify a backup file for each file processed just incase the replace operation didn’t do exactly what you wanted.

100% Free!

Works well in practice though. You can also download a trial from Dreamweaver, it's find/replace utility can run on files in a directory (But it won't save them across sessions like BK ReplaceM does.

[mwb1100]

Just for completeness, I thnk sed should be mentioned (Win32 version is available in the UnxUtils package: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=9328).

It's a scriptable text editor from the Unix world.  It's not simple - quite the contrary - it can be a real bugger to figure out how to use.  But, it's free and there's a lot of resources in Google-space on how to use it.  However, I'd only suggest it if you want to set something up that needs to run repeatedly so a scripted solution would be necessary.

[mrainey]

PSPad is a freeware Windows programming editor that has all the features you're looking for.

http://www.pspad.com/en/pspad.htm



[attach]

[Kruskal]

Thank so much!  I will try ReplaceEm and PSPad.  Sounds great.

Vincent

[Darwin]

Vincent - did you look at VGrep? I ask only because I decided to re-download it and take a look. It's got a very simple interface and does all that you require! I'm impressed - set up a folder with a large number of copied text files and then had it replace text within them all and it worked like a charm. Won't work with Office files, for example, but anything with plain text works...

[Kruskal]

Vincent - did you look at VGrep? I ask only because I decided to re-download it and take a look. It's got a very simple interface and does all that you require! I'm impressed - set up a folder with a large number of copied text files and then had it replace text within them all and it worked like a charm. Won't work with Office files, for example, but anything with plain text works...

VGrap is certainly closer to the limited utility that I was looking for.  I'll look at.  Who knows -- I might really prefer the fancy features of ReplaceEm or PSPad.

Thanks -- Vincent

PS I wonder why I was so unsuccessful in Googling these utilities for myself.  I could find nothing for free.