How to Make Changes to Multiple Files Using Python

Need to modify multiple text files at the same time? For example, change the British spelling of all documents to American spelling. This article will demonstrate how to use Python to efficiently complete this task.

Suppose you have five text files, all of which miswrite "World" as "Wolrd". We will use Python scripts to correct the spelling of words in all these files.

Data preparation

First, prepare the data to be processed (text file). This tutorial creates a directory called "hello" which contains multiple files and subdirectories, as well as text files named 1.txt, 2.txt, 3.txt, 4.txt, and 5.txt.

Although the function we use will iterate through all files in the directory, you can add conditional statements in your code to handle only files that need to be modified.

Code implementation

Next, read the contents of the "hello" directory. You can use the for-in loop to combine the is_file() method and the startswith() method to read and write the target file only.

We open the file in r mode to read the file contents and write to the file after making the necessary changes.

if not item.name.startswith('.') and item.is_file():
    with open(item, mode="r+") as file:
        file_text = file.read()

The key step is to search for "Wolrd" using the regular expression. In Python, use re.compile() to compile regular expressions:

Compile the regular expression pattern into a regular expression object, and can be matched using its search() method.

Then use the sub() method to replace the wrong spelling with the correct spelling:

regex = re.compile('Wolrd')
file_text = regex.sub('World', file_text)

Finally, write the replaced new text to the file:

file.seek(0)
file.write(file_text)

Full code

The full Python script is as follows, which will look for "Wolrd" in each file and replace it with "World":

import os, re

with os.scandir('hello') as directory:
    for item in directory:
        if not item.name.startswith('.') and item.is_file():
            with open(item, mode="r+") as file:
                file_text = file.read()
                regex = re.compile('Wolrd')
                file_text = regex.sub('World', file_text)
                file.seek(0)
                file.write(file_text)

As you can see, Python uses the for loop to easily modify multiple files. It is important to remember that using regular expressions for pattern matching.

For more information about Python loops, please refer to the detailed explanation of Python loops. For more information about regular expressions, please refer to the Python regular expression tutorial.

This article has been updated and includes the contributions of Monty Shokeen. Monty is a full-stack developer who loves writing tutorials and learning new JavaScript libraries.

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