Optimized way to write a series strings to a text file without quotations

Question

I am new to Julia so sorry if this question is obvious.

I am trying to use Julia to help me run a series of finite element models, which use a text input file to give instructions to the finite element solver. Basically, I would like to use Julia to read in the base input file, edit some parameters on some lines of the file and then write it as a new file. I am getting hung up on a couple things though.

Currently, I am reading in the file like this

mdl = "fullmodelSVTV"; #name of input file
A = readlines(mdl*".inp")

This read each line from the file in as a separate string in a vector which I like because it makes it easier to edit the sections I want but it also makes things more difficult when I try to write to a new file.

I am writing the file like this.

io = open("name.inp","w")
print(io,A)
close(io)

When I try to write to a new file the output ends up look like this Output from code which is ["string at index 1","string at index 2","string at index 3"...].

What I would like to do is output this the exact same way is it is read in with string at each index of the vector on its own line. I would also like to remove the brackets and quotation marks from the file, as they might interfere with the finite element solver.

I think I have found a way to concatenate all of the strings at each index and separated them with a new line like shown below.

for i in 1:length(A)
    conc = conc*"\n"*lines[i]
end

The issue with this is that it takes a long time to do given the size of the input files I am working with and I feel like there has to achieve my goal.

I also cannot find a way to remove the brackets or quotation marks when writing the file.

So, I'm wondering if anyone has any advice for a better way to write these text files in terms of both concatenating all of the strings from the vector when outputting as well as outputting without the brackets and quotation marks.

Thanks, any advice is appreciated.

Answer 1

The issue with print(io,A) is that it is printing a representation of the vector, but in fact you want to print each element of the vector. To do so, you can simply print each line in a loop:

open("name.inp", "w") do io
    for line in A
        println(io, line)
    end
end

This avoids the overhead of string concatenation.