#search replace

I find my self always looking this up so here it is:

>> cat text.txt This is some text bannana and here is some more text Bannana and another text BanNAnA >> cat text.txt | sed s/bannana/apple/gi This is some text apple and here is some more text apple and another text apple

Whats Going on

s = Substitute command /../../ = forward slashes are the delimiters bannana = Regular Expression Pattern Search Pattern apple = Replacement string g = global i.e. replace all instances of bannana i = ignore case so Bannana <=> bannana <=> BanNAnA

Search and Replace all the things

using grep you can get all the files that you wish to run search replace on

>> grep -rl 'bannana' bannana-recipe | xargs sed -i 'sed s/bannana/apple/gi'

The breakdown

There are so many ways of using a search replace tool in Excel – you will greatly appreciate the conveniences that such a utility will bring as you work with multiple spreadsheets.

This tool will greatly ease your task when you need to check for messages in cells and more so when you have thousands of cells carrying erroneous information. You will also find such a tool to be really useful in locating and replacing headers and footers in your worksheets. An effective search replace tool is useful in finding all the instances that a certain value appears in a worksheet, particularly noting that it sometimes happens that Excel will find some things and fail to locate others. Similarly you can also use such a tool to find and replace error values as well as text in chart labels and text boxes.

Finding and replacing tasks may seem straightforward but this isn’t quite the case when doing the same needs to be followed up by replacing tasks, particularly when you need to alter information occuring at the end of cells. Another frustrating task that will be made easy through the use of an effective search replace tool is whereby you need to locate and replace apostrophes occurring at the beginning of texts in cells. Other tasks that will be similarly lightened include the search for line breaks, wildcards, searches through multiple workbooks, and finding and replacing pre-pend characters in a range of cells.