Substitute Text

The substitute-text.awk AWK program searches for multiple text strings across multiple files in a directory and replaces them with replacement strings. The program takes a path for the text files the program will modify, the path and filename of the substitute-text.awk program, a delimiter and an input file. The input files included in this repository use the pipe symbol (|) as the delimiter.

Usage

awk -v path="<path>" -f /path/to/substitute-text.awk -F'|' <input-file>

• -v var=val passes a variable to the script. Pass a path to the directory containing the text files that the program will modify.
• -f <program-file>. The path and filename to substitute-text.awk.
• -F overrides default the delimiter from space (\s). The input file uses (|).

Input File Format

Each line of the input file represents an entry, and uses pipe-delimited format per the -F command argument. For example:

can't|cannot
don't|do not

The contractions-list.txt file provides an example of the input file format using the | delimiter.

Known Issues

During testing, lines of the input file beginning with apostrophes generated errors. If the program does not find a match for one of the entries across all files in the path, it will print the following error:

sed: no input files

The error output makes it appear that something has gone wrong. Nothing is wrong. The program simply didn't find a file in the specified path for a particular entry within the input file.

Contraction Substitution

The substitute-text.awk program was developed to replace contractions with their fully-spelled out terms. For example, can't, becomes cannot. Contractions are not considered ESL friendly. Using a GUI editor to replace a term can be cumbersome. Replace All helps expedite substitution within a file, but not across files. Additionally, substutition with search and replace is typically limited to a single term. The original input file for substitute-text.awk is contractions-list.txt and it replaces multiple non-ambiguous contractions. The input file does not address ambiguous contractions such as something's, which could be spelled out as something has or something is.

OSP Attributes

The osp-attributes.txt file contains text strings that should be replaced with the asciidoctor variables incorporated into the master.adoc file by the attributes.adoc file.