How to search and replace text in a file?

As pointed out by michaelb958, you cannot replace in place with data of a different length because this will put the rest of the sections out of place. I disagree with the other posters suggesting you read from one file and write to another. Instead, I would read the file into memory, fix the data up, and then write it out to the same file in a separate step.

# Read in the file
with open('file.txt', 'r') as file :
  filedata = file.read()

# Replace the target string
filedata = filedata.replace('ram', 'abcd')

# Write the file out again
with open('file.txt', 'w') as file:
  file.write(filedata)

Unless you've got a massive file to work with which is too big to load into memory in one go, or you are concerned about potential data loss if the process is interrupted during the second step in which you write data to the file.

fileinput already supports inplace editing. It redirects stdout to the file in this case:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import fileinput

with fileinput.FileInput(filename, inplace=True, backup='.bak') as file:
    for line in file:
        print(line.replace(text_to_search, replacement_text), end='')