If you'd like to replace the strings in the same file, you probably have to read its contents into a local variable, close it, and re-open it for writing:
I am using the with statement in this example, which closes the file after the with
block is terminated - either normally when the last command finishes executing, or by an exception.
def inplace_change(filename, old_string, new_string):
# Safely read the input filename using 'with'
with open(filename) as f:
s = f.read()
if old_string not in s:
print('"{old_string}" not found in {filename}.'.format(**locals()))
return
# Safely write the changed content, if found in the file
with open(filename, 'w') as f:
print('Changing "{old_string}" to "{new_string}" in {filename}'.format(**locals()))
s = s.replace(old_string, new_string)
f.write(s)
It is worth mentioning that if the filenames were different, we could have done this more elegantly with a single with
statement.