Skip to content

taliesinb/goreplace

 
 

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date

Latest commit

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Repository files navigation

About this fork

This fork introduces a couple useful features, and discards one feature that arguably isn't that useful. The full list of changes, roughly in decreasing order of usefulness, is:

  1. --whole, only replace whole string matches.
  2. --ask, which produces interactive prompts to allow the user to accept or reject each candidate replacement, where the context is shown (the line containing the match, before and after replacement, with the contained replacement highlighted when the terminal is in color mode). This feature is Mac/Linux only.
  3. --dry-run, which gives the same output as a real invocation, but doesn't actually change any files.
  4. --show, which displays the context of each match (specifically the line containing the match). In "grep mode", where no replacement is given, this produces exactly one line per match, with the match highlighted on color termianls. In ordinary replace mode, this shows the line before and after replacement. --ask implies --show. --group is respected by --show.
  5. --plain now works in conjunction with replace mode, previously it was disabled, presumably out of fear that $1 etc would still be expanded in the replacement string even though the search regexp had all metacharacters escaped.
  6. The replacement string no longer has double quotes, etc, automatically stripped off it, which was apparently just a quirk of the flag-parsing library and let to many infuriatingly irreversible replacements in my experience.
  7. --unquote, which makes the default beavior of applying Golang string unquote rules to the replacement string optional rather than mandatory.
  8. --group, i.e. grouping behavior is now opt-in rather than opt-out. This more a personal choice of mine. The old code that did grouping 'semi-magically' via Printer is now retired, it only got used for "grep mode" anyway.
  9. --singeline is gone, because it didn't work in replace mode anyway, and goreplace will never be as rich or fast as "ag" anyway.
  10. Replacing with an empty string checks first with the user that they meant to do that -- I've somehow made this mistake a bunch of times before, and it's particularly hard to recover from if you're in the middle of staging changes.

In general the codebase could do with a little simplification, in particular the way that different flags combine and their edge cases is a bit hard to understand and there are probably some bugs there. Also, I could have re-used some existing code but I was in a rush and didn't see it until it was too late.

Anyway, these changes make me much more confident in using goreplace on larger codebases, doing more ambitious replacements, especially thanks to --dry-run and --ask features.

-- @taliesinb

Go Replace

Go Replace (gr) is a simple utility which can be used as replacement for grep + sed combination in one of most popular cases - find files, which contain something, possibly replace this with something else. Main points:

  • Reads .hgignore/.gitignore to skip files
  • Skips binaries
  • Familiar PCRE-like regexp syntax
  • Can perform replacements
  • Fast

Bonus:

  • Can search in file names with -f (i.e. a simple alternative to find)

Build Status

Releases and changelog

Why

Why do thing which is done by grep, find, and sed? Well, for one - I grew tired of typing long commands with pipes and ugly syntax. You want to search? Use grep. Replace? Use find and sed! Different syntax, context switching, etc. Switching from searching to replacing with gr is 'up one item in history and add a replacement string', much simpler!

Besides, it's also faster than grep! Hard to believe, and it's a bit of cheating - but gr by default ignores everything you have in your .hgignore and .gitignore files, skipping binary files and compiled bytecodes (which you usually don't want to touch anyway).

This is my reason to use it - less latency doing task I'm doing often.

Installation

Just download a suitable binary from release page. Put this file in your $PATH and rename it to gr to have easier access.

Building from source

You can also install it from source, if that's your thing:

go get github.com/piranha/goreplace

And you should be done. You have to have $GOPATH set for this to work (go will put sources and generated binary there). Add -u flag there to update your gr.

I prefer name gr to goreplace, so I link gr somewhere in my path (usually in ~/bin) to $GOPATH/bin/goreplace. NOTE: if you use oh-my-zsh, it aliases gr to git remote, so you either should use another name (I propose gor) or remove gr alias:

mkdir -p ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom && echo "unalias gr" >> ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/goreplace.zsh

Usage

Usage is pretty simple, you can just run gr to see help on options. Basically you just supply a regexp (or a simple string - it's a regexp always as well) as an argument and gr will search for it in all files starting from the current directory, just like this:

gr somestring

Some directories and files can be ignored by default (gr is looking for your .hgignore/.gitignore in parent directories), just run gr without any arguments to see help message - it contains information about them.

And to replace:

gr somestring -r replacement

It's performed in place and no backups are made (not that you need them, right? You're using version control, aren't you?). Regular expression submatches supported via $1 syntax - see re2 documentation for more information about syntax and capabilities.

About

command line tool to search and replace

Resources

License

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Packages

No packages published

Languages

  • Go 87.0%
  • Perl 8.6%
  • Makefile 4.4%