Newbie: text replacement in my case

Question

In my Ruby on Rails app, I have a method in my helper which opened a file by:

content = File.open(myfile.txt)

The cont

Answer 1

There is no way to modify the content of a file on the fly. Files can only be appended, they cannot be expanded, so you cannot replace my with her.

You can start from this basic code:

buf = ""

File.open('myfile.txt') do |file|
    file.readlines.each do |line|
        buf << line.gsub('my', "her")
    end
end

File.open('myfile.txt', 'w') do |file|
    file << buf
end

Answer 2

line.gsub!(/my/, "her")

Although you may want to get more specific with the regular expression, e.g.

line.gsub!(/\bmy\./, "her")