CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexbashsed
Mirko Brunner
Mirko Brunner

Reputation: 2215

replace more than one special character with sed

I´m a nooby in regex so i have my headache with sed. I need help to replace all special characters from the given company names with "-".

So this is the given string:

FML Finanzierungs- und Mobilien Leasing GmbH & Co. KG

I want the result:

FML-Finanzierungs-und-Mobilien-Leasing-GmbH-&-Co-KG

I tried the following:

nr = $(echo "$name" | sed -e 's/ /-/g'))

so this replace all whitespaces with -, but what the right expression to replace the others? My one search via google are not very successful.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 353

Answers (4)

Kalanidhi
Kalanidhi

Reputation: 5092

Try this way also

echo "name" | sed 's/ \|- \|\. /-/g'

OutPut :

FML-Finanzierungs-und-Mobilien-Leasing-GmbH-&-Co-KG

Upvotes: 1

Wintermute
Wintermute

Reputation: 44023

That depends on what you consider to be a special character -- I say this because you appear to consider & a regular character but not ., which seems a bit odd. Anyway, I imagine something of the form

nr=$(echo "$name" | sed 's/[^[:alnum:]&]\+/-/g')

would serve you best. Here [^[:alnum:]&] matches any character that is not alphanumeric or &, and [^[:alnum:]&]\+ matches a sequence of one or more such characters, so the sed call replaces all such sequences in $name with a hyphen. If there are other characters that you consider regular, add them to the set. Note that the handling of umlauts and suchlike depends on your locale.

Also note that echo may cause trouble if $name begins with a hyphen (it could be parsed as options for echo), so if you can tether yourself to bash, 

nr=$(sed 's/[^[:alnum:]&]\+/-/g' <<< "$name")

might be more robust.

Upvotes: 2

Jotne
Jotne

Reputation: 41446

Do this help you:

awk -vOFS=- '{gsub(/[.-]/,"");$1=$1}1' <<< "$name"
FML-Finanzierungs-und-Mobilien-Leasing-GmbH-&-Co-KG

gsub(/[.-]/,"") Removes . and _
-vOFS=- sets new field separator to -
$1=$1 reconstruct the line so it uses new field separator
1 print the line.

To get it to a variable

nr=$(awk -vOFS=- '{gsub(/[.-]/,"");$1=$1}1' <<< "$name")

Upvotes: 1

fedorqui
fedorqui

Reputation: 289495

Apparently you wan to remove - and . and then replace spaces with -.

This would do it, by saying sed -e 'one thing' -e 'another thing':

$ echo "$name" | sed -e 's/[-\.]//g' -e 's/ /-/g'
FML-Finanzierungs-und-Mobilien-Leasing-GmbH-&-Co-KG

Note we enclose within square backets all the characters that we want to treat equally: [-\.] means either - or . (we need to escape it, otherwise it would match any character).

Upvotes: 1

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