CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexsed
Peter Webster
Peter Webster

Reputation: 103

Sed script to to rewrite certain strings

I'm dealing with a body of XML files containing unstructured texts with semantic markup for personal names.

For reasons to do with the stylesheet that will eventually show them via a web application, I need to replace:

<persName>Fred</persName>'s
<persName>Wilma</persName>'s

with

<persName>Fred's</persName>
<persName>Wilma's</persName>

I have a single line in a shell script, being run in Gitbash for Windows, below. It runs OK, but has no effect. I suppose I'm missing something obvious, perhaps to do with escaping characters, but any help appreciated.

sed -i "s/<\/persName>\'s/\'s<\/persName>/g"  test.xml

Upvotes: 1

Views: 128

Answers (2)

Wiktor Stribiżew
Wiktor Stribiżew

Reputation: 627083

You may use

sed -i "s,</persName>'s,'s</persName>,g" test.xml

Details

  • s - we want to replace
  • , - a delimiter
  • </persName>'s - this string to find
  • , - delimiter
  • 's</persName> - replace with this string
  • , - delimiter
  • g - multiple times if more than one is found

The -i option makes the replacements directly in the file.

Note that you do not have to escape ' when defining the sed command inside a double quoted string.

It is a good idea to use a delimiter char other than the common / if there are / chars inside the regex or/and replacement pattern.

Upvotes: 4

fancyPants
fancyPants

Reputation: 51908

The comment on your question suggests an easier solution, but I guess, that there might be names where the suffix 's differs, like names ending with an s. So I chose a solution where you grab what's right and put it in the middle.

As separator for the search and replace command in sed you can choose whatever you want. I've chosen #, so you don't have to escape the backslashes in the text. The escaped parantheses store what's inside in variables \1 and \2. 

sed 's#<persName>\(.*\)</persName>\(.*\)#<persName>\1\2</persName>#g' testfile

Result:

<persName>Fred's</persName>
<persName>Wilma's</persName>

If you want to replace it in file, you can use the -i parameter. But be sure to check the result first.

Upvotes: 1

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