CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashsed
Alessandro Maselli
Alessandro Maselli

Reputation: 167

sed: replace a string in a text only if enclosed within quotes

I need to use sed to replace a sequence of characters in a text only if that particular sequence of characters belongs to a string contained within quotes.

e.g. the following text:

This is a YouTube video referenced by the 'movies.YouTube_id' column.

should be transformed like this:

This is a YouTube video referenced by the 'movies.you_tube_id' column.

i.e. replacing the substring "YouTube" with "you_tube" only if such substring is part of a string enclosed within single quotes ('), no matter of the leading and/or trailing characters enclosed within quotes.

Obviously

sed -r "s/YouTube/you_tube/g"

doesn't work because it replaces "YouTube" with "you_tube" everywhere regardless of the quotes. Which regular expression can I use to accomplish the task?

Thank you in advance.

Upvotes: 6

Views: 898

Answers (4)

Cyrus
Cyrus

Reputation: 88583

With GNU sed:

sed -E "s/('[^']*)YouTube([^']*')/\1you_tube\2/g" file

Output:

This is a YouTube video referenced by the 'movies.you_tube_id' column.

Upvotes: 4

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 784998

Here is an awk solution for this:

awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS="\047"} {
for (i=2; i<=NF; i+=2) gsub(/YouTube/, "you_tube", $i)} 1' file

This is a YouTube video referenced by the 'movies.you_tube_id' column.

Sinec we are using single quote as field delimiter, each even numbered field will give us quoted string surrounded by single quote.

Upvotes: 2

RavinderSingh13
RavinderSingh13

Reputation: 133458

Following awk may help you on same:

awk '{sub(/\047movies.YouTube_id\047/,"\047movies.you_tube_id\047")} 1'   Input_file

Output will be as follows:

This is a YouTube video referenced by the 'movies.you_tube_id' column.

Upvotes: 0

Gilles Qu&#233;not
Gilles Qu&#233;not

Reputation: 185025

If the string is not fixed (not already the same), then using look around advanced regexes and :

perl -pe "s/(?<=')(:?\w+\.)?YouTube(?=_id')/you_tube/"

Upvotes: 0

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