Batch editor for text or html files?

Question

is there a tool that can help me to batch edit text files in a certain folder?

I need to delete or insert snippets repeatedly in lots of html files and restructure them.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

sed, the stream editor, is your friend here. For example.

sed -i.bak -e's/<p id="first"/<p id="second"/' file.html

would change all the paragraphs with the id 'first' to id 'second' in file.html, and create file.html.bak into the bargain.

Answer 2

As Julian showed, sed is the right tool for that.

I just want to add two remarks:

you can process multiple files at once, just by providing list of files:

sed -i.bak 's/old text/new text/' dir1/*.html dir2/*.html

Also, if you need to work with some Snippets manually, you can enable Snippets plugin in gedit:

Edit -> Preferences -> Plugins -> Snippets. You might find it handy.