I'm trying to implement a tcl script which reads a text file, and masks all the sensitive information (such as passwords, ip addresses etc) contained it and writes the output to another file.
As of now I'm just substituting this data with ** or ##### and searching the entire file with regexp to find the stuff which I need to mask. But since my text file can be 100K lines of text or more, this is turning out to be incredibly inefficient.
Are there any built in tcl functions/commands I can make use of to do this faster? Do any of the add on packages provide extra options which can help get this done?
Note: I'm using tcl 8.4 (But if there are ways to do this in newer versions of tcl, please do point me to them)
Generally speaking, you should put your code in a procedure to get best performance out of Tcl. (You have got a few more related options in 8.5 and 8.6, such as lambda terms and class methods, but they're closely related to procedures.) You should also be careful with a number of other things:
Put your expressions in braces (expr {$a + $b} instead of expr $a + $b) as that enables a much more efficient compilation strategy.
Pick your channel encodings carefully. (If you do fconfigure $chan -translation binary, that channel will transfer bytes and not characters. However, gets is not be very efficient on byte-oriented channels in 8.4. Using -encoding iso8859-1 -translation lf will give most of the benefits there.)
Tcl does channel buffering quite well.
It might be worth benchmarking your code with different versions of Tcl to see which works best. Try using a tclkit build for testing if you don't want to go to the (minor) hassle of having multiple Tcl interpreters installed just for testing.
The idiomatic way to do line-oriented transformations would be:
proc transformFile {sourceFile targetFile RE replacement} {
# Open for reading
set fin [open $sourceFile]
fconfigure $fin -encoding iso8859-1 -translation lf
# Open for writing
set fout [open $targetFile w]
fconfigure $fout -encoding iso8859-1 -translation lf
# Iterate over the lines, applying the replacement
while {[gets $fin line] >= 0} {
regsub -- $RE $line $replacement line
puts $fout $line
}
# All done
close $fin
close $fout
}
If the file is small enough that it can all fit in memory easily, this is more efficient because the entire match-replace loop is hoisted into the C level:
proc transformFile {sourceFile targetFile RE replacement} {
# Open for reading
set fin [open $sourceFile]
fconfigure $fin -encoding iso8859-1 -translation lf
# Open for writing
set fout [open $targetFile w]
fconfigure $fout -encoding iso8859-1 -translation lf
# Apply the replacement over all lines
regsub -all -line -- $RE [read $fin] $replacement outputlines
puts $fout $outputlines
# All done
close $fin
close $fout
}
Finally, regular expressions aren't necessarily the fastest way to do matching of strings (for example, string match is much faster, but accepts a far more restricted type of pattern). Transforming one style of replacement code to another and getting it to go really fast is not 100% trivial (REs are really flexible).
Especially for very large files - as mentioned - it's not the best way to read the whole file into a variable. As soon as your system runs out of memory you can't prevent your app crashes. For data that is separated by line breaks, the easiest solution is to buffer one line and process it.
Just to give you an example:
# Open old and new file
set old [open "input.txt" r]
set new [open "output.txt" w]
# Configure input channel to provide data separated by line breaks
fconfigure $old -buffering line
# Until the end of the file is reached:
while {[gets $old ln] != -1} {
# Mask sensitive information on variable ln
...
# Write back line to new file
puts $new $ln
}
# Close channels
close $old
close $new
I can't think of any better way to process large files in Tcl - please feel free to tell me any better solution. But Tcl was not made to process large data files. For real performance you may use a compiled instead of a scripted programming language.
Edit: Replaced ![eof $old] in while loop.
A file with 100K lines is not that much (unless every line is 1K chars long :) so I'd suggest you read the entire file into a var and make the substitution on that var:
set fd [open file r+]
set buf [read $fd]
set buf [regsub -all $(the-passwd-pattern) $buf ****]
# write it back
seek $fd 0; # This is not safe! See potrzebie's comment for details.
puts -nonewline $fd $buf
close $fd
Related
I have the next expression: jj_ftfll h\\h\ -0.8898:0.006656 0.998:0.99999 h&j\hhh in a txt file,
and I need to add 0.005 to the 0.006656 number. I want to use Tcl and I can't think of any good idea.
There's several aspects that are tricky.
The file needs to be edited in-place despite the fact that the addition might change the length of the line. (Such an addition could potentially either lengthen or shorten the line.)
There needs to be a way of robustly recognising that that is the line to modify, and not some other line in the file. (This is actually the hardest of these problems in reality; it's extremely application-specific.)
The number needs to be extracted from the line, modified, and written back.
The values you are dealing with are potentially (well, actually) not represented precisely in IEEE binary floating point, which is what Tcl will use to do the calculations.
Bearing all that in mind, we are talking about these sorts of solutions:
We'll read the whole file in, split it into a list of strings, one string per line (henceforth referred to as the lines), update the lines of interest, and then write the whole lot back.
We'll use regexp to decide if a line is of interest. That's by far the most common command for this sort of task.
This one is messy in Tcl 8.6 and before. It's got a much better solution in Tcl 8.7.
There's really not all that much you can do about this. If you know the range of the numbers, you can use format to help… but it's messy. But maybe you'll get lucky.
set filename "foobar.txt"
# Get the lines of the file; this is GREAT if the file isn't too large
set f [open $filename]
set lines [split [read $f] "\n"]
close $f
# Now THAT'S what I call a horrible regular expression!
set RE {^(jj_ftfll\s+h\\\\h\\\s+-?[\d.]+:)(-?[\d.]+)(\s+-?[\d.]+:-?[\d.]+\s+h&j\hhh)$}
set newLines {}
foreach line $lines {
if {[regexp $RE $line -> prefix number suffix]} {
set line $prefix[expr {$number + 0.005}]$suffix
}
lappend newLines $line
}
# Write back over the file; the -nonewline prevents the number of lines from growing
set f [open $filename w]
puts -nonewline $f [join $newLines "\n"]
close $f
The trick with the regexp is that I am matching three pieces: the bit of the line before the part to replace (saved in the variable prefix), the number to replace itself (number), and the bit after the part to replace (suffix); the regexp command returns the number of times it matches (1 if the RE is found, 0 if it isn't). It's a scary RE mostly because it has -?[\d.]+ to match those floating point numbers, and I've changed spaces to \s+ (i.e., “at least one whitespace character”).
The version for 8.7 is this:
set filename "foobar.txt"
# Get the lines of the file; this is GREAT if the file isn't too large
set f [open $filename]
set lines [split [read $f] "\n"]
close $f
# Now THAT'S what I call a horrible regular expression!
set RE {^(jj_ftfll\s+h\\\\h\\\s+-?[\d.]+:)(-?[\d.]+)(\s+-?[\d.]+:-?[\d.]+\s+h&j\hhh)$}
proc addDeltaInLine {delta prefix number suffix} {
set number [expr {$number + $delta}]
return [string cat $prefix $number $suffix]
}
set newLines [lmap line $lines {
regsub -command $RE $line {addDeltaInLine 0.005}
}]
# Write back over the file; the -nonewline prevents the number of lines from growing
set f [open $filename w]
puts -nonewline $f [join $newLines "\n"]
close $f
The combination of lmap and regsub -command clean things up quite a bit. The RE is still scary though…
Below there is a trivial script writing a byte to a file:
set wf [open "test.bin" "w"]
set int_result 0x80
puts -nonewline $wf [binary format c [expr {$int_result}]]
close $wf
exit
Surprisingly, the file will contain 0x3F, not 0x80.
Can anybody explain what is happening?
Thanks a lot,
Dmitry
Tcl prefers to read and write text files by default, which means it does a number of transformations on the data for you both going into Tcl and going out to a file. When working with binary data, you want these switched off. Either use wb instead of w in the call to open (just like in C stdio's fopen() call), or use fconfigure to put the channel into binary mode after opening it.
set wf [open "test.bin" wb]
set wf [open "test.bin" w]
# It's the -translation option for historical/backward-compatibility reasons
fconfigure $wf -translation binary
They're equivalent; the b makes open call (the implementation of) fconfigure internally to set exactly that option.
Quick fix: use
open test.bin wb
to open the file in binary mode.
How do I read the section after end-of-stream (^Z) in a Tcl-script being sourced?
So far I got info script returning the filename of the currently sourced script which I could open just like any file and put the read position to after end-of-stream by just parsing the file.
In theory the content of the file could change between the invocation of source and subsequent info script and open, possibly causing temporal inconsistency between read script and binary data.
Is there a magic command for this that I've missed? Or do we rely on users/administrators making sure such inconsistencies can't happen?
Suggestion
Provide for your custom source that extracts the trailer in the same I/O step as sourcing the contained script. For example:
interp hide {} source source
proc ::source {fp} {
set size [file size $fp]
set chan [open $fp r]
info script $fp
try {
chan configure $chan -eofchar {\u001a {}}
set script [read $chan]
uplevel 1 [list eval $script]
set scriptOffset [chan tell $chan]
if {$scriptOffset < $size} {
chan seek $chan 1 current; # move cursor beyond eof
chan configure $chan -translation binary
set trailer [read $chan]
# do whatever you want to do with the trailer
}
} finally {
close $chan
}
}
Some remarks
The trick is to employ the same machinery as Tcl's source does internally: configure -eofchar.
Once it has been determined, that there is a trailer (i.e., content beyond the eof char), seek is used to position the cursor at the script's offset.
A second read will then get you the trailer.
From this point onwards, you must be careful to maintain the trailer value in its shape as byte array.
Disclaimer: Tcl wizards like Donal might have better ways of doing so. Also, single-file distribution mechanisms like starkits might have helpers for dealing with script trailers.
let's say that I have opened a file using:
set in [open "test.txt" r]
I'm intend to revise some string in the certain line, like:
style="fill:#ff00ff;fill-opacity:1"
and this line number is: 20469
And I want to revise the value ff00ff to other string value like ff0000.
What are the proper ways to do this? Thanks in advance!
You need to open the file in read-write mode; the r+ mode is probably suitable.
In most cases with files up to a reasonable number of megabytes long, you can read the whole file into a string, process that with a command like regsub to perform the change in memory, and then write the whole thing back after seeking to the start of the file. Since you're not changing the size of the file, this will work well. (Shortening the file requires explicit truncation.)
set f [open "test.txt" r+]
set data [read $f]
regsub {(style="fill:#)ff00ff(;fill-opacity:1)"} $data {\1ff0000\2} data
seek $f 0
puts -nonewline $f $data
# If you need it, add this here by uncommenting:
#chan truncate $f
close $f
There are other ways to do the replacement; the choice depends on the details of what you're doing.
Hello i was wondering if its possible to read the last line of a realtime logfile with eggdrop and a .tcl script im able to read the first part of the logfile but thats it it doesnt read anymore of it
Is it possible to put an upper bound on the length of a line of the logfile? If so, it's pretty easy to get the last line:
# A nice fat upper bound!
set upperBoundLength 1024
# Open the log file
set f [open $logfile r]
# Go to some distance from the end; catch because don't care about errors here
catch {seek $f -$upperBoundLength end}
# Read to end, stripping trailing newline
set data [read -nonewline $f]
# Hygiene: close the logfile
close $f
# Get the last line
set lastline [lindex [split $data "\n"] end]
Note that it's not really necessary to do the seek; it just saves you from having to read the vast majority of the file which you presumably don't want.