Search and replace a line in a file in Python

Question

I want to loop over the contents of a text file and do a search and replace on some lines and write the result back to the file. I could first load the whole file in memory and then write it back, but that probably is not the best way to do it.

What is the best way to do this, within the following code?

f = open(file)
for line in f:
    if line.contains('foo'):
        newline = line.replace('foo', 'bar')
        # how to write this newline back to the file

Answer 1

Expanding on @Kiran's answer, which I agree is more succinct and Pythonic, this adds codecs to support the reading and writing of UTF-8:

import codecs 

from tempfile import mkstemp
from shutil import move
from os import remove


def replace(source_file_path, pattern, substring):
    fh, target_file_path = mkstemp()

    with codecs.open(target_file_path, 'w', 'utf-8') as target_file:
        with codecs.open(source_file_path, 'r', 'utf-8') as source_file:
            for line in source_file:
                target_file.write(line.replace(pattern, substring))
    remove(source_file_path)
    move(target_file_path, source_file_path)