How to search and replace text in a file?

Question

How do I search and replace text in a file using Python 3?

Here is my code:

import os
import sys
import fileinput

print ("Text to search for:")
textToSearch = input( "> " )

print ("Text to replace it with:")
textToReplace = input( "> " )

print ("File to perform Search-Replace on:")
fileToSearch  = input( "> " )
#fileToSearch = 'D:\dummy1.txt'

tempFile = open( fileToSearch, 'r+' )

for line in fileinput.input( fileToSearch ):
    if textToSearch in line :
        print('Match Found')
    else:
        print('Match Not Found!!')
    tempFile.write( line.replace( textToSearch, textToReplace ) )
tempFile.close()


input( '\n\n Press Enter to exit...' )

Input file:

hi this is abcd hi this is abcd
This is dummy text file.
This is how search and replace works abcd

When I search and replace 'ram' by 'abcd' in above input file, it works as a charm. But when I do it vice-versa i.e. replacing 'abcd' by 'ram', some junk characters are left at the end.

Replacing 'abcd' by 'ram'

hi this is ram hi this is ram
This is dummy text file.
This is how search and replace works rambcd

Answer 1

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.