bafr

BAtch Find & Replace

Ever written some complex find & replace operations in a text editor, and wished you could save them somewhere and re-run them in the future, either on the same file or other files? This is exactly what bafr (BAtch Find & Replace) does.

You write a bafr script (see syntax below), and then you apply it from the command-line like:

bafr myscript.bafr.toml src/**/*.html

This will apply the script myscript.bafr.toml to all HTML files in the src folder and its subfolders. You don’t need to specify the file paths multiple times if they don’t change, you can include them in your script as defaults (and still override them if needed).

Installation

You will need to have Node.js installed. Then, to install bafr, run:

npm install -g bafr

Syntax

There are three main syntaxes, each more appropriate for different use cases:

1. TOML when your strings are multiline or have weird characters and you want their boundaries to be very explicit
2. YAML when you want a more concise syntax for simple replacements
3. JSON is also supported. It’s not recommended for writing by hand but can be convenient as the output from other tools.

The docs below will show both TOML and YAML, and it’s up to you what you prefer.

Stripping away matches

The most basic bafr script is a single replacement consisting of a single from declaration. By default, when no to is specified, it defaults to the empty string, i.e. stripping away all matches. For example, this bafr script strips away all <br> tags:

from = "<br>"

from: <br>

Note that the YAML syntax allows you to not quote strings in many cases, which can be quite convenient.

Replacing matches with a string

In most cases you’d want to replace the instances found with something else. Here is how you can replace all <br> tags with a newline:

from = "<br>"
to = "\n"

from: <br>
to: "\n"

Multiline strings

This also works, and shows how you can do multiline strings:

from = "<br>"
to = """
"""

I do not recommend using YAML for multiline strings.

Regular expressions

Replacing fixed strings with other fixed strings is useful, but not very powerful. The real power of bafr comes from its ability to use regular expressions. For example, here is how you’d strip all <blink> tags:

regexp = true
from = "<blink>([\S\s]+?)</blink>"
to = "$1" # $1 will match the content of the tag

regexp: true
from: <blink>([\S\s]+?)</blink>
to: $1 # $1 will match the content of the tag

bafr uses the JS dialect for regular expressions (cheatsheet) with the following flags:

• g (global): Replace all occurrences, not just the first one
• m (multiline): ^ and $ match the start and end of lines, not of the whole file.
• s (dotAll): . matches any character, including newlines. Use [^\r\n] to match any character except newlines.
• v (unicodeSets): More reasonable Unicode handling, and named Unicode classes as \p{…} (e.g. \p{Letter}).
• The i flag (case-insensitive) is not on by default, but can be enabled with the ignore_case option.

Multiple find & replace operations

So far our script has only been specifying a single find & replace operation. That’s not very powerful. The real power of Bafr is that a single script can specify multiple find & replace operations, executed in order, with each operating on the result of the previous one. We will refer to each of these as a replacement in the rest of the docs.

Multiple replacements in TOML

To specify multiple find & replace operations, you simply add [[ replace ]] sections:

[[ replace ]]
from = "<blink>"

[[ replace ]]
from = "</blink>"

Here is how we would specify multiple replacements with a to field:

[[ replace ]]
from = "<blink>"
to = '<span class="blink">'

[[ replace ]]
from = "</blink>"
to = "</span>"

Multiple replacements in YAML

If you only need a single key (to strip matches away) YAML provides a very compact syntax:

replace:
- from: <blink>
- from: </blink>

To specify multiple declarations, you need to enclose them in { }:

replace:
- { from: <blink>, to: '<span class="blink">' }
- { from: </blink>, to: "</span>" }

Refer to the matched string

You can always use $& to refer to the matched string (even when not in regexp mode). For example, to wrap every instance of "bafr" with an <abbr> tag you can do:

from = "bafr"
to = '<abbr title="BAtch Find & Replace">$&</abbr>'

from: bafr
to: '<abbr title="BAtch Find & Replace">$&</abbr>'

Beyond $& there is a bunch of other special replacements, all starting with a dollar sign ($). To disable these special replacements, use literal = true / literal: true.

Append/prepend

While $& can be convenient, it’s also a little cryptic. To make it easier to append or prepend matches with a string, bafr also supports before, after, and insert properties.

For example, this will insert "Bar" before every instance of "Foo":

before = "Foo"
insert = "Bar"

before: Foo
insert: Bar

after is also supported and works as you might expect.

[!NOTE] insert is literally just a an alias of to, it just reads nicer in these cases.

You can also combine these with from to add additional criteria. For example this script:

from = "bafr"
after = "using"
to = "awesome bafr"

Will convert "I am using bafr" to "I am using awesome bafr".

[from, to] shortcut syntax for many simple replacements

There are many cases where you want to make many replacements, all with the same settings (specified on their parent) and just different from/to values. Bafr supports a shortcut for this.

Instead of declarations, you can specify from/to pairs directly by enclosing them in brackets, separated by a comma. This can be combined with regular replacements, though far more easily in YAML:

replace:
- [foo, bar]
- [baz, quux]
- {from: yolo, to: hello} # regular replacement

In TOML, it cannot be combined with regular [[ replace ]] blocks, so all replacements need to be specified in a different way:

replace = [
	["foo", "bar"],
	["baz", "quux"],
	# cannot be combined with [[ replace ]] blocks
	{ from = "yolo", to = "hello", ignore_case = true },
]

Syntax reference

Replacement settings

Key	Type	Default	Description
from	String	(Mandatory)	The string to search for.
to	String	""	The string to replace the from string with.
before	String	-	Match only strings before this one. Will be interpreted as a regular expression in regexp mode.
after	String	-	Match only strings after this one. Will be interpreted as a regular expression in regexp mode.
regexp	Boolean	false	Whether the from field should be treated as a regular expression.
ignore_case	Boolean	false	Set to true to make the search should case-insensitive.
whole_word	Boolean	false	Match only matches either beginning/ending in non-word characters or preceded/followed by non-word characters. Unicode aware.
recursive	Boolean	false	Whether the replacement should be run recursively on its own output until it stops changing the output.
files	String or array of strings	-	Partial paths to filter against. This is an additional filter over the files being processed, to apply specific replacements only to some of the files.

Global settings

Key	Type	Default	Description
files	String or array of strings	-	A glob pattern to match files to process.
suffix	String	""	Instead of overwriting the original file, append this suffix to its filename
extension	String	-	Instead of overwriting the original file, change its extension to this value. Can start with a . but doesn’t need to.
path	String	-	Allows the new file to be in a different directory. Both absolute and relative paths are supported. If relative, it's resolved based on the original file's location. For example, .. will write a file one directory level up.

CLI

To use the files specified in the script, simply run:

bafr script.bafr.toml

Where script.bafr.toml is your bafr script (and could be a .yaml or .json file).

To override the files specified in the script, specify them after the script file name, like so:

bafr script.bafr.toml src/*.md

The syntax (TOML, YAML, JSON) is inferred from the file extension. To override that (or to use an arbitrary file extension) you can use --format:

bafr script.bafr --format=toml

[!NOTE] You can name your script however you want, however ending in .bafr.ext is recommended (where ext is toml, yaml, json, etc.) to make it clear that this is a bafr script.

Supported flags

• --verbose
• --dry-run: Just print out the output and don’t write anything

JS API

There are two classes: Bafr that has the most functionality but only works in Node, and Replacer with the core functionality that works in both Node and the browser.

Replacer

import { Replacer } from "bafr/replacer";

Instance methods:

• replacer.transform(content): Process a string and return the result.

Bafr (Node.js-only)

import Bafr from "bafr";

Instance methods:

• bafr.text(content): Process a string (internally calls replacer.transform()).
• bafr.file(path [, outputPath]): Process a file and write the results back (async).
• bafr.files(paths): Process multiple files and write the results back
• bafr.glob(pattern): Process multiple files and write the results back

Future plans

I/O

• A way to intersect globs, e.g. the script specifies **/*.html then the script user specifies folder/** and all HTML files in folder are processed.
• A way to change the extension of the output file

CLI

• Interactive mode
• --help flag
• --version flag