Powershell or Batch: find and replace characters

Question

I have ten text files (tab delimited, 200K rows). My intention is to seek characters [, ], | and replace them with a, o, u, respectively. Any hints how to do this using Windows batch script or Powershell?

Solution

This should take care of it, using Powershell. This can be done with straight cmd.exe stuff and some built-in Windows executables, but it would be far uglier and more difficult to comprehend.

It will read in some file, and on each line:

• replace [ with a
• replace ] with o
• replace | with u

The escapes are needed since [, ], and | are all special characters in powershell, and the backtick ` is used to word-wrap commands.

$filename="textfile.txt"
$outputfile="$filename" + ".out"

Get-Content $filename | Foreach-object {
    $_ -replace '\[', 'a' `
       -replace '\]', 'o' `
       -replace '\|', 'u'
} | Set-Content $outputfile

If you want to process a list of files, you could set up an array to do this, and run through the array.

$filenames = @("/path/to/File1.txt", "file2.txt", "file3.txt")
foreach ($file in $filenames) {
    $outfile = "$file" + ".out"

    Get-Content $file | Foreach-object {
        $_ -replace '\[', 'a' `
           -replace '\]', 'o' `
           -replace '\|', 'u'
    } | Set-Content $outfile
}

Comments

[Jaykul]

You really shouldn't use the () around the Get-Content unless you .absolutely have to edit the file in place -- it causes all the lines to be collected before replacing, which is going to be really expensive with large files