Running multiple "find and replace" at once

[igneousc]

I have a text document that I write every day and need to find and replace certain text before I'm done with it. For a while now I just paste the text into bbedit, and find and replace those sections that occur in that document that day and I'm done. But Im trying to figure out the easiest way to automate this so I can do it all with a single click.

The sections of text that I need to replace each day are roughly 20 sections of text, so something like 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.
So I would search for "1" and replace with a blank spot
search for "2" and replace with a blank spot
search for "4" and replace with a blank spot
every day is different, but its always one of those same sections of text like 1,2, 3, 4 etc.

I tried to figure it out in shortcuts, as well as the bbedit menu, but couldn't figure anything out that worked, and had a hard time finding a youtube tutorial showing me how to do this. Its not super complicated, so I feel like I'm not searching for the right terms or something. Any tips?

 

[BrianBaughn]

Did you search for "macos batch find and replace"?

I don't know of anything but perhaps the terminology will narrow down the results.

 

[chabig]

I'm sure BBEdit can do that all in one move using GREP. I recommend downloading and referring to the BBEdit User Manual for help. I'm not GREP smart, but others here probably are.

 

[igneousc]

Did you search for "macos batch find and replace"?

I don't know of anything but perhaps the terminology will narrow down the results.

yeah I did a couple similar searches like that and it leads to a lot of people looking to find and replace across multiple files

 

[igneousc]

I'm sure BBEdit can do that all in one move using GREP. I recommend downloading and referring to the BBEdit User Manual for help. I'm not GREP smart, but others here probably are.

yea right now I have them mostly saved as patterns in the find and replace box, so I just run them one by one. My worry is that some solution will require me to get the paid version of bbedit and its probably not worth me spending $40 a year for

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

You could make an Applescript or Shell script and use GREP to do so.

 

[TechnoMonk]

I use shell script for text manipulation in my datasets. A simple shell script or python can easily do the job. Ability to run Linux/Unix type libraries is one of the good things I like about Macs.

 

[chown33]

You might look at the 'sed' command to peform multiple edits on multiple patterns.

You might also look at inverting the problem. That is, instead of looking at it as a text file with multiple patterns that are replaced, consider treating it as a series of text fragments in individual files, which are ultimately concatenated into a single composite text document. Each of the individual replaceable pieces sits in its own file, as does each constant piece. Write each replaceable piece using the 'echo' command with redirected stdout, e.g. echo "text you want" >piece-4.txt.

The 'echo' command can write any text to any file. It will overwrite if you use the > redirection operator, or it will append if you use >>. Those are shell operators, so you will need to use them in a shell script.

After all the fixed and variable pieces are in their proper files, the 'cat' command can concatenate them, and again you use one of the redirection operators to write the composite output to a file. If one of the pieces needs to appear more than once, simply give its filename again at the proper point in the sequence.

Although this might seem complex at first glance, it has the advantage of you not needing to learn any reg-exes, nor how to replace things with 'sed' or whatever. That is, each individual step is simple to understand and work with, and the result is obtained by adding together a bunch of simple parts.

 

[Basic75]

To the people suggesting grep(1), that doesn't replace, it only searches. You can use sed(1) or awk(1), or a scripting language to do complex text manipulations.