Copyright (c) 2015 Will Roberts <[email protected]>
Licensed under the MIT License (see file LICENSE.rst
for details).
Search and replace on file(s), with matching on fixed strings.
fsed
is a tool specially designed for situations where you have to do many string search-and-replace operations with fixed strings (that is, fsed
doesn't do regular expressions). By doing all the searching and replacing on all the patterns at the same time, fsed
can be much faster than tools that do string rewriting one pattern at a time (like one-liners in sed
or perl
).
To do its searching, fsed
uses the Aho-Corasick algorithm, which is a very clever way of matching multiple patterns at the same time, and was used to implement the original fgrep Unix utility (now accessed as grep -F
). This algorithm is capable of finding matches which overlap each other, and in these cases, fsed
must choose which matches to rewrite. The policy adopted by fsed
is to be greedy, and always rewrite the shortest, leftmost match first.
For illustration, imagine a situation where we would like to rewrite a
with b
, aa
with c
, and aaa
with d
. What should we do when we see the input string aaa
? Should we produce bbb
, bc
, cb
, or d
? fsed
produces bbb
in this case.
fsed
is written in Python; you can install it with pip:
pip install fsed
fsed [OPTIONS] PATTERN_FILE [INPUT_FILE [INPUT_FILE2 ...]]
If one or more INPUT_FILEs
are specified, fsed
reads and concatenates these as its input; otherwise, fsed
reads the standard input.
Options:
--pattern-format=FMT
Set FMT to
tsv
orsed
(default issed
) to specify the format ofPATTERN_FILE
.-o/--output=OUTFILE
Specifies that the program output should be written to
OUTFILE
. If this option is not used,fsed
writes to standard output.-w/--words
Makes
fsed
match only on word boundaries; this flag instructsfsed
to append\b
to the beginning and end of every pattern inPATTERN_FILE
.--by-line/--across-lines
Sets whether
fsed
should process the input line by line or character by character; the default is--across-lines
.--slow
Indicates that
fsed
should try very hard to always find the longest matches on the input; this is very slow, and forces--by-line
to be on.-q
Quiet operation, do not emit warnings.
-v/--verbose
Turns on debugging output.
Note: fsed
runs even faster using PyPy:
pypy -m fsed.fsed [OPTIONS] PATTERN_FILE [INPUT_FILE [INPUT_FILE2 ...]]
PATTERN_FILE
contains a list of patterns to search and replace in the input; each pattern is listed on a separate line. fsed
supports two formats for specifying patterns. The default, sed
, specifies strings and their replacements the way the sed
utility does:
s/SEARCH/REPLACE/
The character following the s
character is the pattern delimiter, and can be any character (it does not have to be a forward slash).
The other format, tsv
, specifies patterns using <TAB>
characters as delimiters:
SEARCH<TAB>REPLACE
In this format, there must be only one <TAB>
character per line.
Patterns can contain escape characters:
\\
Backslash (\)
\a
ASCII bell (BEL)
\b
Word boundary
\f
ASCII formfeed (FF)
\n
ASCII linefeed (LF)
\r
Carriage Return (CR)
\t
Horizontal Tab (TAB)
\v
ASCII vertical tab (VT)