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

Using hamishmcn's answer as a template I was able to search for a line in a file that match my regex and replacing it with empty string.

import re 

fin = open("in.txt", 'r') # in file
fout = open("out.txt", 'w') # out file
for line in fin:
    p = re.compile('[-][0-9]*[.][0-9]*[,]|[-][0-9]*[,]') # pattern
    newline = p.sub('',line) # replace matching strings with empty string
    print newline
    fout.write(newline)
fin.close()
fout.close()