Find and replace words/lines in a file

Solution 1:

Any decent text editor has a search&replace facility that supports regular expressions.

If however, you have reason to reinvent the wheel in Java, you can do:

Path path = Paths.get("test.txt");
Charset charset = StandardCharsets.UTF_8;

String content = new String(Files.readAllBytes(path), charset);
content = content.replaceAll("foo", "bar");
Files.write(path, content.getBytes(charset));

This only works for Java 7 or newer. If you are stuck on an older Java, you can do:

String content = IOUtils.toString(new FileInputStream(myfile), myencoding);
content = content.replaceAll(myPattern, myReplacement);
IOUtils.write(content, new FileOutputStream(myfile), myencoding);

In this case, you'll need to add error handling and close the streams after you are done with them.

IOUtils is documented at http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-io/javadocs/api-release/org/apache/commons/io/IOUtils.html

Solution 2:

After visiting this question and noting the initial concerns of the chosen solution, I figured I'd contribute this one for those not using Java 7 which uses FileUtils instead of IOUtils from Apache Commons. The advantage here is that the readFileToString and the writeStringToFile handle the issue of closing the files for you automatically. (writeStringToFile doesn't document it but you can read the source). Hopefully this recipe simplifies things for anyone new coming to this problem.

  try {
     String content = FileUtils.readFileToString(new File("InputFile"), "UTF-8");
     content = content.replaceAll("toReplace", "replacementString");
     File tempFile = new File("OutputFile");
     FileUtils.writeStringToFile(tempFile, content, "UTF-8");
  } catch (IOException e) {
     //Simple exception handling, replace with what's necessary for your use case!
     throw new RuntimeException("Generating file failed", e);
  }

Solution 3:

public static void replaceFileString(String old, String new) throws IOException {
    String fileName = Settings.getValue("fileDirectory");
    FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(fileName);
    String content = IOUtils.toString(fis, Charset.defaultCharset());
    content = content.replaceAll(old, new);
    FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(fileName);
    IOUtils.write(content, new FileOutputStream(fileName), Charset.defaultCharset());
    fis.close();
    fos.close();
}

above is my implementation of Meriton's example that works for me. The fileName is the directory (ie. D:\utilities\settings.txt). I'm not sure what character set should be used, but I ran this code on a Windows XP machine just now and it did the trick without doing that temporary file creation and renaming stuff.

Solution 4:

You might want to use Scanner to parse through and find the specific sections you want to modify. There's also Split and StringTokenizer that may work, but at the level you're working at Scanner might be what's needed.

Here's some additional info on what the difference is between them: Scanner vs. StringTokenizer vs. String.Split