CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxbashunixsed
Sam
Sam

Reputation: 31

Parenthesize the third character of every word using sed

I'm trying to parenthesize the third character of every word in a text file using sed. I've tried manipulating:

sed 's/\(\b[A-Z]\)/\(\1\)/g' filename

This does what I need except, it parenthesizes the first character, not the third.

It gives me: "Welcome To The Geek Stuff" => "(W)elcome (T)o (T)he (G)eek (S)tuff"

What I want is: "Welcome To The Geek Stuff" => “We(l)come To Th(e) Ge(e)k St(u)ff”

How can I parenthesize the third character of each word?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1569

Answers (3)

potong
potong

Reputation: 58483

This might work for you (GNU sed):

sed 's/\b\(.\B.\)\B\(.\)/\1(\2)/g' file

This looks for the second non-word boundary from the start of a word boundary and surrounds the following character with parens.

Upvotes: 0

Jotne
Jotne

Reputation: 41460

Here is an awk version:

cat file
Hi, this is a test with some data.


awk '{for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) {split($i,a,"");if (a[3]~/[[:alpha:]]/) $i=substr($i,1,2)"("a[3]")"substr($i,4)}}1' file
Hi, th(i)s is a te(s)t wi(t)h so(m)e da(t)a.

It test if third letter in the word is an alphabetic character,
if so, recreate the word with () around third character.

Upvotes: 0

Avinash Raj
Avinash Raj

Reputation: 174786

This sed command must put every third character present in a word within parenthesis. 

$ echo 'Welcome To The Geek Stuff' | sed 's/\b\([A-Z][a-z]\)\([a-z]\)/\1(\2)/g'
We(l)come To Th(e) Ge(e)k St(u)ff

$ echo 'Welcome To The Geek Stuff' | sed 's/\b\([a-z][a-z]\)\([a-z]\)/\1(\2)/gi'
We(l)come To Th(e) Ge(e)k St(u)ff

Add i modifier in-order to do a case-insensitive match.

Upvotes: 6

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