changing text in multiple files

[Anonymous Monk]

In a group of html files in a single directory I went to change all instances of 2003 to 2004 in each file.
How can I do this in PERL? (no this is not homework)
Thanks in advance for your wisdom!

[gellyfish]

perl -pi -e's/2003/2004/g' *.html

should do it.

/J\

[bassplayer]

perl -p -i.bak -e 's/2003/2004/g' *.html

This will edit all files in place, after making a backup copy called <filename>.bak.

[Limbic~Region]

Anonymous Monk,
While you have several replies that address changing 2003 to 2004 universally in a bunch of files, no one has mentioned that "rendered" text often does not look like the underlying HTML. Many tags could be "imbedded" in the text that you do not see as an end product. The methods provided so far do not address this. You will need to use one of the numerous HTML parsers such as HTML::TokeParser::Simple available on CPAN to get those cases. The problem is keeping track of the tags so the formatting is not lost either.

[ViceRaid]

Good point - I posted a short example showing how to use this module to change HTML text (only) in reply to your follow-up question.

[blue_cowdawg]

n a group of html files in a single directory I went to change all instances of 2003 to 2004 in each file.

There are many ways of skinning that cat and the only one who won't be happy will be the cat.

One way:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w 
#############################################
# useage: update.pl PATH
#   where PATH is the full path of the directory 
#   we want to fix the files in. 
use strict;
use Tie::File;

exit(0) unless $ARGV[0];

chdir $ARGV[0]
   or die "Cound not chdir to " . $ARGV[0];
#
# Create your own messages for above.

my @files=glob("*.html");

foreach my $file(@files){
   my @ry=();
   tie @ry,"Tie::File",$file 
     or die "Could not open $file";
   $_=~s/2003/2004/g foreach @ry;
   utie @ry;
}

Just one of many, many, ways of doing this.

[Plankton]

$ perl -pi -e 's/2003/2004/g' *