Replace string within file contents

Question

How can I open a file, Stud.txt, and then replace any occurences of \"A\" with \"Orange\"?

Answer 1

If you'd like to replace the strings in the same file, you probably have to read its contents into a local variable, close it, and re-open it for writing:

I am using the with statement in this example, which closes the file after the with block is terminated - either normally when the last command finishes executing, or by an exception.

def inplace_change(filename, old_string, new_string):
    # Safely read the input filename using 'with'
    with open(filename) as f:
        s = f.read()
        if old_string not in s:
            print('"{old_string}" not found in {filename}.'.format(**locals()))
            return

    # Safely write the changed content, if found in the file
    with open(filename, 'w') as f:
        print('Changing "{old_string}" to "{new_string}" in {filename}'.format(**locals()))
        s = s.replace(old_string, new_string)
        f.write(s)

It is worth mentioning that if the filenames were different, we could have done this more elegantly with a single with statement.