A lot of the answers here helped point me in the right direction, however none were suitable for me, so I am posting my solution.
I have Windows 7, which comes with PowerShell built-in. Here is the script I used to find/replace all instances of text in a file:
powershell -Command "(gc myFile.txt) -replace 'foo', 'bar' | Out-File -encoding ASCII myFile.txt"
To explain it:
powershell
starts up powershell.exe, which is included in Windows 7-Command "... "
is a command line arg for powershell.exe containing the command to run(gc myFile.txt)
reads the content ofmyFile.txt
(gc
is short for theGet-Content
command)-replace 'foo', 'bar'
simply runs the replace command to replacefoo
withbar
| Out-File myFile.txt
pipes the output to the filemyFile.txt
-encoding ASCII
prevents transcribing the output file to unicode, as the comments point out
Powershell.exe should be part of your PATH statement already, but if not you can add it. The location of it on my machine is C:\WINDOWS\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0
Update
Apparently modern windows systems have PowerShell built in allowing you to access this directly using
(Get-Content myFile.txt) -replace 'foo', 'bar' | Out-File -encoding ASCII myFile.txt