How to batch edit text in jupyter notebooks?

Question

Problem : I have dozens of jupyter notebooks that all have some text that I need to replace.

Example

Each notebook contains a reference to an external file in directory foo .

 ./
  |- foo
  |   |- image.jpg
  |   |- ...
  |- notebooks
      |- file1.ipynb
      |- file2.ipynb
      |- file3.ipynb
      |- ...

However, the foo directory will soon be renamed to bar , thereby orphaning the associated links in the notebooks. Thus, I will need to rename all the links in each notebook from the old foo directory name to the new bar name, eg foo/image.jpg to bar/image.jpg .

Question : Opening each one by one will take a lot of time. Is there an efficient and safe solution for batch editing text for multiple jupyter notebooks?

Approach

Since notebooks are essentially json files, I am considering a simple search and replace in VSCode. I've tried this on a test notebook and it seems to work, but I am not sure if this method will somehow corrupt the files. I appreciate any safe suggestions.

Answer 1

Are you on *nix? Then sed will work.

cd ./path/to/notebooks
sed -i 's/foo/bar/g' *.ipynb

or you can use vim argsadd coupled with argsdo

ie.,

vim
:cd path/to/notebooks
:arg *.ipynb
:argdo %s/foo/bar/ge | update