pypyr.steps.fileformat

find & replace tokens in text files

Parses input text file, substitutes {tokens} in the text of the file from the pypyr context and writes the result to an output file.

  - name: pypyr.steps.fileformat
    comment: read a file from disk,
             do some substitutions,
             write back to disk.
    in:
      fileFormat:
        in: ./in/arb.txt # required
        out: ./out/arb.txt # optional

So if you had a text file like this:

{k1} sit thee down and write
In a book that all may {k2}

And your pypyr context were:

k1: pypyr
k2: read

You would end up with an output file like this:

pypyr sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read

The file in and out paths support substitutions.

See a worked example of fileformat.

escape characters

If your file contains {curly braces} that pypyr should NOT try to substitute, you probably should use filereplace instead. For json and yaml, use fileformatjson and fileformatyaml respectively.

file format settings

in and out behave in the same way for all the format style steps. Therefore this section’s description of in and out settings applies not only to fileformat, but also fileformatjson, fileformatyaml and filereplace.

set input & output files

fileformat expects the following context keys:

• fileFormat
  • in
    • Mandatory path(s) to source file on disk.
    • This can be a string path to a single file, or a glob, or a list of paths and/or globs.
    • Each path can be a glob, a relative or absolute path.
  • out
    • Write output file to here. Will create directories in path if these do not exist already.
    • out is optional. If not specified, will edit the in files in-place.
    • If in-path refers to >1 file (e.g it’s a glob or list), out path can only be a directory - it doesn’t make sense to write >1 file to the same single file output (this is not an appender.)
    • To ensure out path means a directory and not a file, be sure to have the os' path separator (/ on a sane filesystem) at the end.
    • If you specify an out directory without a file-name, out files will have the same name they had in in.

multiple files & globs

You can format multiple files in the same step. This works in two ways:

• in is glob like ./**/myfile.arb

fileFormat:
  # ** recurses sub-dirs per usual globbing
  in: ./testfiles/sub3/**/*.txt
  # note the dir separator at the end.
  # since >1 in files, out can only be a dir.
  out: ./out/replace/

• in is a list of paths and/or globs.

fileFormat:
  in:
    # ** recurses sub-dirs per usual globbing
    - ./testfiles/sub3/**/*.txt
    - ./testfiles/??b/fileformat-in.*.txt
    - ./testfiles/static.file
  # note the dir separator at the end.
  # since >1 in files, out can only be a dir.
  out: ./out/replace/

in-place edit

If you do not specify out, pypyr will over-write (i.e edit in-place) all the files you specify in in.

fileFormat:
  # in-place edit/overwrite all the files in. this can also be a glob, or
  # a mixed list of paths and/or globs.
  in: ./infile.txt