File::Inplace(3pm)

🎀 File::Inplace 🎀

ok bestie, so this whole page is the manual for File::Inplace(3pm) — that's the User Contributed Perl Documentation section, iykyk — and it's literally about editing files in place. Let's get into it 💅

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✨ NAME ✨

File::Inplace — Perl module for in-place editing of files

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

  use File::Inplace;

  my $editor = new File::Inplace(file => "file.txt");
  while (my ($line) = $editor->next_line) {
    $editor->replace_line(reverse $line);
  }
  $editor->commit;

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

So File::Inplace is a perl module that exists to make the super common task of editing a file in-place way less of a whole thing. It was inspired by the various flavors of perl's -i option, but it's built for editing that's a little more structured and reusable than what command-line perl usually lets you get away with. Periodt.

The big promise here — and it's giving main character energy ngl — is file integrity. Meaning: either all the changes you made get saved to the file, or none of them do. No half-edited mess left behind 😭

It also hands you a bunch of extra goodies: backup creation, automatic field splitting per-line, automatic chomping/unchomping, and the ability to abort your edits partway through without ever touching the original file. Obsessed.

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🌈 CONSTRUCTOR 🌈

File::Inplace gives you exactly one constructor, it takes a bunch of parameters, and one of them is required. That's it, that's the whole vibe.

File::Inplace->new(file => "filename", ...)

• file — the one required parameter, no exceptions bestie. This is the name of the file you're editing. You literally cannot skip this one.
• suffix — the suffix for your backup files. If you don't specify it, no backups get made at all. Your call 🫶
• chomp — if you set this to zero, then automatic chomping just… doesn't happen. Newlines (or more precisely, whatever's in $/) stay sitting in the strings that come back from next_line. And also, the contents of $/ won't get appended when you replace lines.
• regex — if you specify this, then every line gets split by this parameter whenever you use the next_line_split method. If you leave it unspecified, it defaults to \s+.
• separator — the default character used to join each line when replace_line is invoked with a list instead of a single value. Defaults to a single space.

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🦋 INSTANCE METHODS 🦋

• $editor->next_line () — in scalar context, it returns the next line of the input file, or undef if there's no line left. In an array context, it returns a single value of the line, or an empty list if there's no line.
• $editor->replace_line (value) — replaces the current line in the output file with the value you gave it. If you pass it a list, then each value gets joined by the separator you specified at construction time.
• $editor->next_line_split () — literally next_line, except it splits based on the regex you specified in the constructor.
• $editor->has_lines () — returns true if the file still has any further lines. Vibe check on whether there's more to read.
• $editor->all_lines () — returns an array of all the lines in the file being edited. The whole thing, yes ma'am.
• $editor->replace_all_lines (@lines) — replaces all remaining lines in the file with the @lines you passed in.
• $editor->commit () — completes the edit operation and saves your changes to the edited file. This is the slay moment ✨
• $editor->rollback () — aborts the edit process. Nope, we're not doing this anymore.
• $editor->commit_to_backup () — saves your edits to the backup file instead of the original file. Sneaky, but legal 💜

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💜 AUTHOR 💜

Chip Turner, <chipt@cpan.org>

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👑 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE 👑

Copyright (C) 2005 by Chip Turner

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.6.0 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.

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and that's the whole page bestie, no cap 🧚

ok so real talk, that footer at the bottom of the original said perl v5.38.2 and it was dated 2024-03-04 — so that's the version of perl this page shipped with and the day it got stamped. bye, love u, go edit some files 💖🌸🎀