Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/ruby-medicine-substitution-multiple-files/
The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. It is responsible for protecting and promoting public health through the regulation and supervision of food safety, tobacco products, dietary supplements, prescription and over-the-counter pharmaceutical drugs (medications), vaccines, biopharmaceuticals, blood transfusions, medical devices, electromagnetic radiation emitting devices (ERED), cosmetics, animal foods & feed[5] and veterinary products. exhales
The FDA provides a compressed data file of the Drugs@FDA database, which includes information on the drugs approved by the FDA. All fields in the data files are separated by tab delimiters. While the official online Drugs@FDA application is updated daily, the data file in the link above is updated once per week, usually on Wednesdays.
The Issue…
You may be asking: “Why are you telling me this?” Good question.
To make the issue clear, the first thing I want you to do is download the database drugsfda.zip (1.7 MB), and unzip the file. When you unzip the file, you will notice 9 text files (tables), as shown in the figure below:
From the title of this article, you’ve probably surmised that we’re going to figure out how to make content changes to all of these files simultaneously. That’s why I like you, you are a surmiser.
Say that you decide to replace the word drug with medication in one of the FDA files. This is simple, and, of course, there are advanced forms of search and substitution. In fact, I mention a couple of these methods in the article about hunting for the gene sequence.
If we had only one file, that would be straightforward. However, in our case, we have 9 text files we want to search and alter. Obviously, the word drug occurs in more than one text file. In fact, it occurs in the following files:
- AppDoc
- application
- ChemTypeLookup
- Product