fileinput

[naaman]

On Aug 13, 7:50 am, Dave Angel <da... at ieee.org> wrote:
> naaman wrote:
> > On Aug 12, 1:35 pm, Dave Angel <da... at ieee.org> wrote:
>
> >> naaman wrote:
>
> >>> I'm writing my first Python script and
> >>> I want to use fileinput to open a file in r+ mode.
> >>> Tried fileinput.input(sys.argv[1:],"r+") but that didn't work.
> >>> ANy ideas?
>
> >>> Need to find and overwrite a line in a file several times.
> >>> I can do it using open and seek() etc. but was wondering if I can use
> >>> fileinput.
>
> >>> thanks;
>
> >> I haven't used it, but check out the 'inplace' keyword parameter.
>
> >> DaveA
>
> > I've only Python for a week so I'm not sure what inplace does
>
> You should read the docs for it
>     (http://www.python.org/doc/2.6.2/library/fileinput.html ),
> but it's not very clear to me either  So I dug up an example on the web:
>      (ref:  http://effbot.org/librarybook/fileinput.htm)
>
> import fileinput, sys
>
> for line in fileinput.input(inplace=1):
>     # /convert Windows/DOS text files to Unix files/
>     if line[-2:] == "\r\n":
>         line = line[:-2] + "\n"
>     sys.stdout.write(line)
>
> The inplace argument tells it to create a new file with the same name as
> the original (doing all the necessary nonsense with using a scratch
> file, and renaming/deleting) for each file processed.  Stdout is pointed
> to that new version of the file.  Notice that you have to explicitly
> write everything you want to wind up in the file -- if a given line is
> to remain unchanged, you just write "line" directly.
>
> If you're new to Python, I do not recommend trying to do open/seek to
> update a text file in place, especially if you're in DOS.  There are
> lots of traps.  the inplace method of fileinput avoids these by
> implicitly creating temp files and handling the details for you, which
> probably works great if you're dealing with text, in order.
>
> DaveA

Thanks Dave. I'll check that out