CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxbashawksed
FireHawk2300
FireHawk2300

Reputation: 97

sed delete match within quotes on line containing several quotes

I have a file called names.xml

That looks like the below:

    NAME="Stacey" SURNAME="Ford"  
    blah blah blah  
    NAME="Stacey" SURNAME="Ford"  
    blah blah blah

I need to find all occurrences of NAME=" and with the "" quotes I need to replace the name with another value.

So the output needs to look like this:

    NAME="Jack" SURNAME="Ford"  
    blah blah blah  
    NAME="Jack" SURNAME="Ford"  
    blah blah blah

I am using: sed 's/NAME=".*"/NAME="Jack"/g' names.xml

But this is the result it gives me: 

    NAME="Jack"  
    blah blah blah  
    NAME="Jack"  
    blah blah blah

It is looking at everything up until the last " on SURNAME.

Your time and assistance is greatly appreciated.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 118

Answers (2)

Jotne
Jotne

Reputation: 41460

Here is an awk version:

awk -F\" -vOFS=\" '$1~/NAME=/ {$2="Jack"}1' file
    NAME="Jack" SURNAME="Ford"
    blah blah blah
    NAME="Jack" SURNAME="Ford"
    blah blah blah

Use " as field separator. If field 1 contains NAME= replace filed 2 with Jack and print it.

Upvotes: 2

Avinash Raj
Avinash Raj

Reputation: 174806

You need to use a negated character class [^"]* which matches any character but not of " zero or more times. .* in your regex is greedy by default, it eats all the characters upto the last " double quotes. So that only it matches Stacey and upto the last Ford. And also you must need to add a word boundary \b before the NAME, so that it won't match the string NAME in SURNAME . \b matches between a word character and a non-word character.

sed 's/\bNAME="[^"]*"/NAME="Jack"/g' names.xml

Upvotes: 5

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