Search and replace a line in a file in Python

Question

I want to loop over the contents of a text file and do a search and replace on some lines and write the result back to the file. I could first load the whole file in memory

Answer 1

A more pythonic way would be to use context managers like the code below:

from tempfile import mkstemp
from shutil import move
from os import remove

def replace(source_file_path, pattern, substring):
    fh, target_file_path = mkstemp()
    with open(target_file_path, 'w') as target_file:
        with open(source_file_path, 'r') as source_file:
            for line in source_file:
                target_file.write(line.replace(pattern, substring))
    remove(source_file_path)
    move(target_file_path, source_file_path)

You can find the full snippet here.