Find and replace

Ruby
1

I have a text file that contains file paths as follows:

I want to replace the string “drug” by “med” wherever it occurs.

I used something like the following:

gsub!(/(drug)/,‘medication’) if contents.include? ‘drug’

(/(drug)/ is supposed to be a regular expression, but, I may be writing
it wrongly.

Do you know what I can do to perform such task?

Thanks.

2

SW Engineer wrote in post #1171014:

I have a text file that contains file paths as follows:

http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/1998/11961lbl.pdf

That is not a file path but a URL.

I want to replace the string “drug” by “med” wherever it occurs.

I used something like the following:

gsub!(/(drug)/,‘medication’) if contents.include? ‘drug’

The check with “if” is superfluous as #gsub will only replace if there
are matches. An additional check will only make it slower.

(/(drug)/ is supposed to be a regular expression, but, I may be writing
it wrongly.

The expression is OK (apart from brackets which are not needed here). On
what object are you invoking #gsub!?

Do you know what I can do to perform such task?

If you have the file contents in a variable called “contents” then you
can simply do

contents.gsub!(/drugs/, ‘medication’)

A simpler solution would be to use sed on the command line:

sed ‘s#drugs#medication#g’ file

You can even do that in place

sed -i.bak ‘s#drugs#medication#g’ file

Cheers

robert