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I have a file in which some lines contain a json object on a single line, and I want to extract the value of the window_indicator property.
A normal regular expression is: "window_indicator":\s*([\-\d\.]+) in which I want the value of the fist match group.
Here it is working perfectly well: https://regex101.com/r/w9Iuch/1
I've settled on sed because it seems that grep has to print the whole line and can't limit to the match group value, and perl is overkill.
Unfortunately, sed isn't actually capable of doing this, is it?
# sed 's/("window_indicator:)/\1/' in.txt
sed: -e expression #1, char 26: invalid reference \1 on `s' command's RHS
# sed -E 's/("window_indicator":)/\1/p' in.txt
prints out every line of the file
# sed -rn 's/("window_indicator":)/\1/p' in.txt
prints the whole line
# sed -rn 's/("window_indicator":)/\1/' in.txt
nothing
With sed, you need to match the whole line, capture what you need, replace the whole match with Group 1 placeholder, and make sure you suppress the default line output and only print the new text after successful substitution:
sed -nE 's/.*"window_indicator":[[:space:]]*([-0-9.]+).*/\1/p' in.txt
If the first match is to be retrieved, add q to quit:
sed -nE 's/.*"window_indicator":[[:space:]]*([-0-9.]+).*/\1/p;q' in.txt
Note that \d is not supported in POSIX regex, it is replaced with 0-9 range in the bracket expression here.
Details
n - suppress default line output
E - enables POSIX ERE flavor
.*"window_indicator":[[:space:]]*([-0-9.]+).* - finds
.* - any text
"window_indicator": - a fixed string
[[:space:]]* - zero or more whitespaces (GNU sed supports \s, too)
([-0-9.]+) - Group 1: one or more digits, - or .
.* - any text
\1 - replaces with Group 1 value
p - prints the result upon successful replacement
q - quits processing the stream.
With GNU grep, it is even easier:
grep -oP '"window_indicator":\s*\K[-\d.]+' in.txt
To get the first match,
grep -oP '"window_indicator":\s*\K[-\d.]+' in.txt | head -1
Here,
o - outputs matched texts only
P - enables the PCRE regex engine
"window_indicator":\s*\K[-\d.]+ - matches
"window_indicator": - a fixed string
\s* - zero or more whitespaces
\K - removes the text matched so far from the match value
[-\d.]+ - matches one or more -, . or digits.
1st solution: With your shown samples please try following awk code. Though its always advised to use json parsers like: jq. Simple explanation would be, using match function of awk here, where using regex "window_indicator":[0-9]+} in it to match needed value. If regex is successfully matched then creating variable val which has sub-string of matched regex in current line. Then substituting "window_indicator": and } with NULL in val and printing val which will give needed value.
awk '
match($0,/"window_indicator":[0-9]+}/){
val=substr($0,RSTART,RLENGTH)
gsub(/"window_indicator":|}/,"",val)
print val
}
' Input_file
2nd solution: Using GNU grep where using positive look ahead and positive look behind mechanism and getting the expected output as per requirement.
grep -oP '(?<="window_indicator":)\d+(?=})' Input_file
Using sed
$ sed -E 's/.*window_indicator":([0-9]+).*/\1/' input_file
0
Using grep
$ grep -Po '.*window_indicator":\K\d+' input_file
0
Using awk
$ awk '{match($0,/.*window_indicator":([0-9]+)/,arr);print arr[1]}' input_file
0
I want to extract strings between two patterns with GREP, but when no match is found, I would like to print a blank line instead.
Input
This is very new
This is quite old
This is not so new
Desired Output
is very
is not so
I've attempted:
grep -o -P '(?<=This).*?(?=new)'
But this does not preserve the second blank line in the above example. Have searched for over an hour, tried a few things but nothing's worked out.
Will happily used a solution in SED if that's easier!
You can use
#!/bin/bash
s='This is very new
This is quite old
This is not so new'
sed -En 's/.*This(.*)new.*|.*/\1/p' <<< "$s"
See the online demo yielding
is very
is not so
Details:
E - enables POSIX ERE regex syntax
n - suppresses default line output
s/.*This(.*)new.*|.*/\1/ - finds any text, This, any text (captured into Group 1, \1, and then any text again, or the whole string (in sed, line), and replaces with Group 1 value.
p - prints the result of the substitution.
And this is what you need for your actual data:
sed -En 's/.*"user_ip":"([^"]*).*|.*/\1/p'
See this online demo. The [^"]* matches zero or more chars other than a " char.
With your shown samples, please try following awk code.
awk -F'This\\s+|\\s+new' 'NF==3{print $2;next} NF!=3{print ""}' Input_file
OR
awk -F'This\\s+|\\s+new' 'NF==3{print $2;next} {print ""}' Input_file
Explanation: Simple explanation would be, setting This\\s+ OR \\s+new as field separators for all the lines of Input_file. Then in main program checking condition if NF(number of fields) are 3 then print 2nd field (where next will take cursor to next line). In another condition checking if NF(number of fields) is NOT equal to 3 then simply print a blank line.
sed:
sed -E '
/This.*new/! s/.*//
s/.*This(.*)new.*/\1/
' file
first line: lines not matching "This.*new", remove all characters leaving a blank line
second lnie: lines matching the pattern, keep only the "middle" text
this is not the pcre non-greedy match: the line
This is new but that is not new
will produce the output
is new but that is not
To continue to use PCRE, use perl:
perl -lpe '$_ = /This(.*?)new/ ? $1 : ""' file
This might work for you:
sed -E 's/.*This(.*)new.*|.*/\1/' file
If the first match is made, the line is replace by everything between This and new.
Otherwise the second match will remove everything.
N.B. The substitution will always match one of the conditions. The solution was suggested by Wiktor Stribiżew.
I'm trying to use sed to clean up lines of URLs to extract just the domain.
So from:
http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/
I want:
http://www.suepearson.co.uk/
(either with or without the trailing slash, it doesn't matter)
I have tried:
sed 's|\(http:\/\/.*?\/\).*|\1|'
and (escaping the non-greedy quantifier)
sed 's|\(http:\/\/.*\?\/\).*|\1|'
but I can not seem to get the non-greedy quantifier (?) to work, so it always ends up matching the whole string.
Neither basic nor extended Posix/GNU regex recognizes the non-greedy quantifier; you need a later regex. Fortunately, Perl regex for this context is pretty easy to get:
perl -pe 's|(http://.*?/).*|\1|'
In this specific case, you can get the job done without using a non-greedy regex.
Try this non-greedy regex [^/]* instead of .*?:
sed 's|\(http://[^/]*/\).*|\1|g'
With sed, I usually implement non-greedy search by searching for anything except the separator until the separator :
echo "http://www.suon.co.uk/product/1/7/3/" | sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*\)/.*;\1;p'
Output:
http://www.suon.co.uk
this is:
don't output -n
search, match pattern, replace and print s/<pattern>/<replace>/p
use ; search command separator instead of / to make it easier to type so s;<pattern>;<replace>;p
remember match between brackets \( ... \), later accessible with \1,\2...
match http://
followed by anything in brackets [], [ab/] would mean either a or b or /
first ^ in [] means not, so followed by anything but the thing in the []
so [^/] means anything except / character
* is to repeat previous group so [^/]* means characters except /.
so far sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*\) means search and remember http://followed by any characters except / and remember what you've found
we want to search untill the end of domain so stop on the next / so add another / at the end: sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*\)/' but we want to match the rest of the line after the domain so add .*
now the match remembered in group 1 (\1) is the domain so replace matched line with stuff saved in group \1 and print: sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*\)/.*;\1;p'
If you want to include backslash after the domain as well, then add one more backslash in the group to remember:
echo "http://www.suon.co.uk/product/1/7/3/" | sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*/\).*;\1;p'
output:
http://www.suon.co.uk/
Simulating lazy (un-greedy) quantifier in sed
And all other regex flavors!
Finding first occurrence of an expression:
POSIX ERE (using -r option)
Regex:
(EXPRESSION).*|.
Sed:
sed -r 's/(EXPRESSION).*|./\1/g' # Global `g` modifier should be on
Example (finding first sequence of digits) Live demo:
$ sed -r 's/([0-9]+).*|./\1/g' <<< 'foo 12 bar 34'
12
How does it work?
This regex benefits from an alternation |. At each position engine tries to pick the longest match (this is a POSIX standard which is followed by couple of other engines as well) which means it goes with . until a match is found for ([0-9]+).*. But order is important too.
Since global flag is set, engine tries to continue matching character by character up to the end of input string or our target. As soon as the first and only capturing group of left side of alternation is matched (EXPRESSION) rest of line is consumed immediately as well .*. We now hold our value in the first capturing group.
POSIX BRE
Regex:
\(\(\(EXPRESSION\).*\)*.\)*
Sed:
sed 's/\(\(\(EXPRESSION\).*\)*.\)*/\3/'
Example (finding first sequence of digits):
$ sed 's/\(\(\([0-9]\{1,\}\).*\)*.\)*/\3/' <<< 'foo 12 bar 34'
12
This one is like ERE version but with no alternation involved. That's all. At each single position engine tries to match a digit.
If it is found, other following digits are consumed and captured and the rest of line is matched immediately otherwise since * means
more or zero it skips over second capturing group \(\([0-9]\{1,\}\).*\)* and arrives at a dot . to match a single character and this process continues.
Finding first occurrence of a delimited expression:
This approach will match the very first occurrence of a string that is delimited. We can call it a block of string.
sed 's/\(END-DELIMITER-EXPRESSION\).*/\1/; \
s/\(\(START-DELIMITER-EXPRESSION.*\)*.\)*/\1/g'
Input string:
foobar start block #1 end barfoo start block #2 end
-EDE: end
-SDE: start
$ sed 's/\(end\).*/\1/; s/\(\(start.*\)*.\)*/\1/g'
Output:
start block #1 end
First regex \(end\).* matches and captures first end delimiter end and substitues all match with recent captured characters which
is the end delimiter. At this stage our output is: foobar start block #1 end.
Then the result is passed to second regex \(\(start.*\)*.\)* that is same as POSIX BRE version above. It matches a single character
if start delimiter start is not matched otherwise it matches and captures the start delimiter and matches the rest of characters.
Directly answering your question
Using approach #2 (delimited expression) you should select two appropriate expressions:
EDE: [^:/]\/
SDE: http:
Usage:
$ sed 's/\([^:/]\/\).*/\1/g; s/\(\(http:.*\)*.\)*/\1/' <<< 'http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/'
Output:
http://www.suepearson.co.uk/
Note: this will not work with identical delimiters.
sed does not support "non greedy" operator.
You have to use "[]" operator to exclude "/" from match.
sed 's,\(http://[^/]*\)/.*,\1,'
P.S. there is no need to backslash "/".
sed - non greedy matching by Christoph Sieghart
The trick to get non greedy matching in sed is to match all characters excluding the one that terminates the match. I know, a no-brainer, but I wasted precious minutes on it and shell scripts should be, after all, quick and easy. So in case somebody else might need it:
Greedy matching
% echo "<b>foo</b>bar" | sed 's/<.*>//g'
bar
Non greedy matching
% echo "<b>foo</b>bar" | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g'
foobar
Non-greedy solution for more than a single character
This thread is really old but I assume people still needs it.
Lets say you want to kill everything till the very first occurrence of HELLO. You cannot say [^HELLO]...
So a nice solution involves two steps, assuming that you can spare a unique word that you are not expecting in the input, say top_sekrit.
In this case we can:
s/HELLO/top_sekrit/ #will only replace the very first occurrence
s/.*top_sekrit// #kill everything till end of the first HELLO
Of course, with a simpler input you could use a smaller word, or maybe even a single character.
HTH!
This can be done using cut:
echo "http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/" | cut -d'/' -f1-3
another way, not using regex, is to use fields/delimiter method eg
string="http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/"
echo $string | awk -F"/" '{print $1,$2,$3}' OFS="/"
sed certainly has its place but this not not one of them !
As Dee has pointed out: Just use cut. It is far simpler and much more safe in this case. Here's an example where we extract various components from the URL using Bash syntax:
url="http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/"
protocol=$(echo "$url" | cut -d':' -f1)
host=$(echo "$url" | cut -d'/' -f3)
urlhost=$(echo "$url" | cut -d'/' -f1-3)
urlpath=$(echo "$url" | cut -d'/' -f4-)
gives you:
protocol = "http"
host = "www.suepearson.co.uk"
urlhost = "http://www.suepearson.co.uk"
urlpath = "product/174/71/3816/"
As you can see this is a lot more flexible approach.
(all credit to Dee)
sed 's|(http:\/\/[^\/]+\/).*|\1|'
There is still hope to solve this using pure (GNU) sed. Despite this is not a generic solution in some cases you can use "loops" to eliminate all the unnecessary parts of the string like this:
sed -r -e ":loop" -e 's|(http://.+)/.*|\1|' -e "t loop"
-r: Use extended regex (for + and unescaped parenthesis)
":loop": Define a new label named "loop"
-e: add commands to sed
"t loop": Jump back to label "loop" if there was a successful substitution
The only problem here is it will also cut the last separator character ('/'), but if you really need it you can still simply put it back after the "loop" finished, just append this additional command at the end of the previous command line:
-e "s,$,/,"
sed -E interprets regular expressions as extended (modern) regular expressions
Update: -E on MacOS X, -r in GNU sed.
Because you specifically stated you're trying to use sed (instead of perl, cut, etc.), try grouping. This circumvents the non-greedy identifier potentially not being recognized. The first group is the protocol (i.e. 'http://', 'https://', 'tcp://', etc). The second group is the domain:
echo "http://www.suon.co.uk/product/1/7/3/" | sed "s|^\(.*//\)\([^/]*\).*$|\1\2|"
If you're not familiar with grouping, start here.
I realize this is an old entry, but someone may find it useful.
As the full domain name may not exceed a total length of 253 characters replace .* with .\{1, 255\}
This is how to robustly do non-greedy matching of multi-character strings using sed. Lets say you want to change every foo...bar to <foo...bar> so for example this input:
$ cat file
ABC foo DEF bar GHI foo KLM bar NOP foo QRS bar TUV
should become this output:
ABC <foo DEF bar> GHI <foo KLM bar> NOP <foo QRS bar> TUV
To do that you convert foo and bar to individual characters and then use the negation of those characters between them:
$ sed 's/#/#A/g; s/{/#B/g; s/}/#C/g; s/foo/{/g; s/bar/}/g; s/{[^{}]*}/<&>/g; s/}/bar/g; s/{/foo/g; s/#C/}/g; s/#B/{/g; s/#A/#/g' file
ABC <foo DEF bar> GHI <foo KLM bar> NOP <foo QRS bar> TUV
In the above:
s/#/#A/g; s/{/#B/g; s/}/#C/g is converting { and } to placeholder strings that cannot exist in the input so those chars then are available to convert foo and bar to.
s/foo/{/g; s/bar/}/g is converting foo and bar to { and } respectively
s/{[^{}]*}/<&>/g is performing the op we want - converting foo...bar to <foo...bar>
s/}/bar/g; s/{/foo/g is converting { and } back to foo and bar.
s/#C/}/g; s/#B/{/g; s/#A/#/g is converting the placeholder strings back to their original characters.
Note that the above does not rely on any particular string not being present in the input as it manufactures such strings in the first step, nor does it care which occurrence of any particular regexp you want to match since you can use {[^{}]*} as many times as necessary in the expression to isolate the actual match you want and/or with seds numeric match operator, e.g. to only replace the 2nd occurrence:
$ sed 's/#/#A/g; s/{/#B/g; s/}/#C/g; s/foo/{/g; s/bar/}/g; s/{[^{}]*}/<&>/2; s/}/bar/g; s/{/foo/g; s/#C/}/g; s/#B/{/g; s/#A/#/g' file
ABC foo DEF bar GHI <foo KLM bar> NOP foo QRS bar TUV
Have not yet seen this answer, so here's how you can do this with vi or vim:
vi -c '%s/\(http:\/\/.\{-}\/\).*/\1/ge | wq' file &>/dev/null
This runs the vi :%s substitution globally (the trailing g), refrains from raising an error if the pattern is not found (e), then saves the resulting changes to disk and quits. The &>/dev/null prevents the GUI from briefly flashing on screen, which can be annoying.
I like using vi sometimes for super complicated regexes, because (1) perl is dead dying, (2) vim has a very advanced regex engine, and (3) I'm already intimately familiar with vi regexes in my day-to-day usage editing documents.
Since PCRE is also tagged here, we could use GNU grep by using non-lazy match in regex .*? which will match first nearest match opposite of .*(which is really greedy and goes till last occurrence of match).
grep -oP '^http[s]?:\/\/.*?/' Input_file
Explanation: using grep's oP options here where -P is responsible for enabling PCRE regex here. In main program of grep mentioning regex which is matching starting http/https followed by :// till next occurrence of / since we have used .*? it will look for first / after (http/https://). It will print matched part only in line.
echo "/home/one/two/three/myfile.txt" | sed 's|\(.*\)/.*|\1|'
don bother, i got it on another forum :)
sed 's|\(http:\/\/www\.[a-z.0-9]*\/\).*|\1| works too
Here is something you can do with a two step approach and awk:
A=http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/
echo $A|awk '
{
var=gensub(///,"||",3,$0) ;
sub(/\|\|.*/,"",var);
print var
}'
Output:
http://www.suepearson.co.uk
Hope that helps!
Another sed version:
sed 's|/[:alnum:].*||' file.txt
It matches / followed by an alphanumeric character (so not another forward slash) as well as the rest of characters till the end of the line. Afterwards it replaces it with nothing (ie. deletes it.)
#Daniel H (concerning your comment on andcoz' answer, although long time ago): deleting trailing zeros works with
s,([[:digit:]]\.[[:digit:]]*[1-9])[0]*$,\1,g
it's about clearly defining the matching conditions ...
You should also think about the case where there is no matching delims. Do you want to output the line or not. My examples here do not output anything if there is no match.
You need prefix up to 3rd /, so select two times string of any length not containing / and following / and then string of any length not containing / and then match / following any string and then print selection. This idea works with any single char delims.
echo http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/ | \
sed -nr 's,(([^/]*/){2}[^/]*)/.*,\1,p'
Using sed commands you can do fast prefix dropping or delim selection, like:
echo 'aaa #cee: { "foo":" #cee: " }' | \
sed -r 't x;s/ #cee: /\n/;D;:x'
This is lot faster than eating char at a time.
Jump to label if successful match previously. Add \n at / before 1st delim. Remove up to first \n. If \n was added, jump to end and print.
If there is start and end delims, it is just easy to remove end delims until you reach the nth-2 element you want and then do D trick, remove after end delim, jump to delete if no match, remove before start delim and and print. This only works if start/end delims occur in pairs.
echo 'foobar start block #1 end barfoo start block #2 end bazfoo start block #3 end goo start block #4 end faa' | \
sed -r 't x;s/end//;s/end/\n/;D;:x;s/(end).*/\1/;T y;s/.*(start)/\1/;p;:y;d'
If you have access to gnu grep, then can utilize perl regex:
grep -Po '^https?://([^/]+)(?=)' <<< 'http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/'
http://www.suepearson.co.uk
Alternatively, to get everything after the domain use
grep -Po '^https?://([^/]+)\K.*' <<< 'http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/'
/product/174/71/3816/
The following solution works for matching / working with multiply present (chained; tandem; compound) HTML or other tags. For example, I wanted to edit HTML code to remove <span> tags, that appeared in tandem.
Issue: regular sed regex expressions greedily matched over all the tags from the first to the last.
Solution: non-greedy pattern matching (per discussions elsewhere in this thread; e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/a/46719361/1904943).
Example:
echo '<span>Will</span>This <span>remove</span>will <span>this.</span>remain.' | \
sed 's/<span>[^>]*>//g' ; echo
This will remain.
Explanation:
s/<span> : find <span>
[^>] : followed by anything that is not >
*> : until you find >
//g : replace any such strings present with nothing.
Addendum
I was trying to clean up URLs, but I was running into difficulty matching / excluding a word - href - using the approach above. I briefly looked at negative lookarounds (Regular expression to match a line that doesn't contain a word) but that approach seemed overly complex and did not provide a satisfactory solution.
I decided to replace href with ` (backtick), do the regex substitutions, then replace ` with href.
Example (formatted here for readability):
printf '\n
<a aaa h href="apple">apple</a>
<a bbb "c=ccc" href="banana">banana</a>
<a class="gtm-content-click"
data-vars-link-text="nope"
data-vars-click-url="https://blablabla"
data-vars-event-category="story"
data-vars-sub-category="story"
data-vars-item="in_content_link"
data-vars-link-text
href="https:example.com">Example.com</a>\n\n' |
sed 's/href/`/g ;
s/<a[^`]*`/\n<a href/g'
apple
banana
Example.com
Explanation: basically as above. Here,
s/href/` : replace href with ` (backtick)
s/<a : find start of URL
[^`] : followed by anything that is not ` (backtick)
*` : until you find a `
/<a href/g : replace each of those found with <a href
Unfortunately, as mentioned, this it is not supported in sed.
To overcome this, I suggest to use the next best thing(actually better even), to use vim sed-like capabilities.
define in .bash-profile
vimdo() { vim $2 --not-a-term -c "$1" -es +"w >> /dev/stdout" -cq! ; }
That will create headless vim to execute a command.
Now you can do for example:
echo $PATH | vimdo "%s_\c:[a-zA-Z0-9\\/]\{-}python[a-zA-Z0-9\\/]\{-}:__g" -
to filter out python in $PATH.
Use - to have input from pipe in vimdo.
While most of the syntax is the same. Vim features more advanced features, and using \{-} is standard for non-greedy match. see help regexp.
I would like to update a large number of C++ source files with an extra include directive before any existing #includes. For this sort of task, I normally use a small bash script with sed to re-write the file.
How do I get sed to replace just the first occurrence of a string in a file rather than replacing every occurrence?
If I use
sed s/#include/#include "newfile.h"\n#include/
it replaces all #includes.
Alternative suggestions to achieve the same thing are also welcome.
A sed script that will only replace the first occurrence of "Apple" by "Banana"
Example
Input: Output:
Apple Banana
Apple Apple
Orange Orange
Apple Apple
This is the simple script: Editor's note: works with GNU sed only.
sed '0,/Apple/{s/Apple/Banana/}' input_filename
The first two parameters 0 and /Apple/ are the range specifier. The s/Apple/Banana/ is what is executed within that range. So in this case "within the range of the beginning (0) up to the first instance of Apple, replace Apple with Banana. Only the first Apple will be replaced.
Background: In traditional sed the range specifier is also "begin here" and "end here" (inclusive). However the lowest "begin" is the first line (line 1), and if the "end here" is a regex, then it is only attempted to match against on the next line after "begin", so the earliest possible end is line 2. So since range is inclusive, smallest possible range is "2 lines" and smallest starting range is both lines 1 and 2 (i.e. if there's an occurrence on line 1, occurrences on line 2 will also be changed, not desired in this case). GNU sed adds its own extension of allowing specifying start as the "pseudo" line 0 so that the end of the range can be line 1, allowing it a range of "only the first line" if the regex matches the first line.
Or a simplified version (an empty RE like // means to re-use the one specified before it, so this is equivalent):
sed '0,/Apple/{s//Banana/}' input_filename
And the curly braces are optional for the s command, so this is also equivalent:
sed '0,/Apple/s//Banana/' input_filename
All of these work on GNU sed only.
You can also install GNU sed on OS X using homebrew brew install gnu-sed.
# sed script to change "foo" to "bar" only on the first occurrence
1{x;s/^/first/;x;}
1,/foo/{x;/first/s///;x;s/foo/bar/;}
#---end of script---
or, if you prefer: Editor's note: works with GNU sed only.
sed '0,/foo/s//bar/' file
Source
An overview of the many helpful existing answers, complemented with explanations:
The examples here use a simplified use case: replace the word 'foo' with 'bar' in the first matching line only.
Due to use of ANSI C-quoted strings ($'...') to provide the sample input lines, bash, ksh, or zsh is assumed as the shell.
GNU sed only:
Ben Hoffstein's anwswer shows us that GNU provides an extension to the POSIX specification for sed that allows the following 2-address form: 0,/re/ (re represents an arbitrary regular expression here).
0,/re/ allows the regex to match on the very first line also. In other words: such an address will create a range from the 1st line up to and including the line that matches re - whether re occurs on the 1st line or on any subsequent line.
Contrast this with the POSIX-compliant form 1,/re/, which creates a range that matches from the 1st line up to and including the line that matches re on subsequent lines; in other words: this will not detect the first occurrence of an re match if it happens to occur on the 1st line and also prevents the use of shorthand // for reuse of the most recently used regex (see next point).1
If you combine a 0,/re/ address with an s/.../.../ (substitution) call that uses the same regular expression, your command will effectively only perform the substitution on the first line that matches re.
sed provides a convenient shortcut for reusing the most recently applied regular expression: an empty delimiter pair, //.
$ sed '0,/foo/ s//bar/' <<<$'1st foo\nUnrelated\n2nd foo\n3rd foo'
1st bar # only 1st match of 'foo' replaced
Unrelated
2nd foo
3rd foo
A POSIX-features-only sed such as BSD (macOS) sed (will also work with GNU sed):
Since 0,/re/ cannot be used and the form 1,/re/ will not detect re if it happens to occur on the very first line (see above), special handling for the 1st line is required.
MikhailVS's answer mentions the technique, put into a concrete example here:
$ sed -e '1 s/foo/bar/; t' -e '1,// s//bar/' <<<$'1st foo\nUnrelated\n2nd foo\n3rd foo'
1st bar # only 1st match of 'foo' replaced
Unrelated
2nd foo
3rd foo
Note:
The empty regex // shortcut is employed twice here: once for the endpoint of the range, and once in the s call; in both cases, regex foo is implicitly reused, allowing us not to have to duplicate it, which makes both for shorter and more maintainable code.
POSIX sed needs actual newlines after certain functions, such as after the name of a label or even its omission, as is the case with t here; strategically splitting the script into multiple -e options is an alternative to using an actual newlines: end each -e script chunk where a newline would normally need to go.
1 s/foo/bar/ replaces foo on the 1st line only, if found there.
If so, t branches to the end of the script (skips remaining commands on the line). (The t function branches to a label only if the most recent s call performed an actual substitution; in the absence of a label, as is the case here, the end of the script is branched to).
When that happens, range address 1,//, which normally finds the first occurrence starting from line 2, will not match, and the range will not be processed, because the address is evaluated when the current line is already 2.
Conversely, if there's no match on the 1st line, 1,// will be entered, and will find the true first match.
The net effect is the same as with GNU sed's 0,/re/: only the first occurrence is replaced, whether it occurs on the 1st line or any other.
NON-range approaches
potong's answer demonstrates loop techniques that bypass the need for a range; since he uses GNU sed syntax, here are the POSIX-compliant equivalents:
Loop technique 1: On first match, perform the substitution, then enter a loop that simply prints the remaining lines as-is:
$ sed -e '/foo/ {s//bar/; ' -e ':a' -e '$!{n;ba' -e '};}' <<<$'1st foo\nUnrelated\n2nd foo\n3rd foo'
1st bar
Unrelated
2nd foo
3rd foo
Loop technique 2, for smallish files only: read the entire input into memory, then perform a single substitution on it.
$ sed -e ':a' -e '$!{N;ba' -e '}; s/foo/bar/' <<<$'1st foo\nUnrelated\n2nd foo\n3rd foo'
1st bar
Unrelated
2nd foo
3rd foo
1 1.61803 provides examples of what happens with 1,/re/, with and without a subsequent s//:
sed '1,/foo/ s/foo/bar/' <<<$'1foo\n2foo' yields $'1bar\n2bar'; i.e., both lines were updated, because line number 1 matches the 1st line, and regex /foo/ - the end of the range - is then only looked for starting on the next line. Therefore, both lines are selected in this case, and the s/foo/bar/ substitution is performed on both of them.
sed '1,/foo/ s//bar/' <<<$'1foo\n2foo\n3foo' fails: with sed: first RE may not be empty (BSD/macOS) and sed: -e expression #1, char 0: no previous regular expression (GNU), because, at the time the 1st line is being processed (due to line number 1 starting the range), no regex has been applied yet, so // doesn't refer to anything.
With the exception of GNU sed's special 0,/re/ syntax, any range that starts with a line number effectively precludes use of //.
sed '0,/pattern/s/pattern/replacement/' filename
this worked for me.
example
sed '0,/<Menu>/s/<Menu>/<Menu><Menu>Sub menu<\/Menu>/' try.txt > abc.txt
Editor's note: both work with GNU sed only.
You could use awk to do something similar..
awk '/#include/ && !done { print "#include \"newfile.h\""; done=1;}; 1;' file.c
Explanation:
/#include/ && !done
Runs the action statement between {} when the line matches "#include" and we haven't already processed it.
{print "#include \"newfile.h\""; done=1;}
This prints #include "newfile.h", we need to escape the quotes. Then we set the done variable to 1, so we don't add more includes.
1;
This means "print out the line" - an empty action defaults to print $0, which prints out the whole line. A one liner and easier to understand than sed IMO :-)
Quite a comprehensive collection of answers on linuxtopia sed FAQ. It also highlights that some answers people provided won't work with non-GNU version of sed, eg
sed '0,/RE/s//to_that/' file
in non-GNU version will have to be
sed -e '1s/RE/to_that/;t' -e '1,/RE/s//to_that/'
However, this version won't work with gnu sed.
Here's a version that works with both:
-e '/RE/{s//to_that/;:a' -e '$!N;$!ba' -e '}'
ex:
sed -e '/Apple/{s//Banana/;:a' -e '$!N;$!ba' -e '}' filename
With GNU sed's -z option you could process the whole file as if it was only one line. That way a s/…/…/ would only replace the first match in the whole file. Remember: s/…/…/ only replaces the first match in each line, but with the -z option sed treats the whole file as a single line.
sed -z 's/#include/#include "newfile.h"\n#include'
In the general case you have to rewrite your sed expression since the pattern space now holds the whole file instead of just one line. Some examples:
s/text.*// can be rewritten as s/text[^\n]*//. [^\n] matches everything except the newline character. [^\n]* will match all symbols after text until a newline is reached.
s/^text// can be rewritten as s/(^|\n)text//.
s/text$// can be rewritten as s/text(\n|$)//.
#!/bin/sed -f
1,/^#include/ {
/^#include/i\
#include "newfile.h"
}
How this script works: For lines between 1 and the first #include (after line 1), if the line starts with #include, then prepend the specified line.
However, if the first #include is in line 1, then both line 1 and the next subsequent #include will have the line prepended. If you are using GNU sed, it has an extension where 0,/^#include/ (instead of 1,) will do the right thing.
Just add the number of occurrence at the end:
sed s/#include/#include "newfile.h"\n#include/1
A possible solution:
/#include/!{p;d;}
i\
#include "newfile.h"
:a
n
ba
Explanation:
read lines until we find the #include, print these lines then start new cycle
insert the new include line
enter a loop that just reads lines (by default sed will also print these lines), we won't get back to the first part of the script from here
I know this is an old post but I had a solution that I used to use:
grep -E -m 1 -n 'old' file | sed 's/:.*$//' - | sed 's/$/s\/old\/new\//' - | sed -f - file
Basically use grep to print the first occurrence and stop there. Additionally print line number ie 5:line. Pipe that into sed and remove the : and anything after so you are just left with a line number. Pipe that into sed which adds s/.*/replace to the end number, which results in a 1 line script which is piped into the last sed to run as a script on the file.
so if regex = #include and replace = blah and the first occurrence grep finds is on line 5 then the data piped to the last sed would be 5s/.*/blah/.
Works even if first occurrence is on the first line.
i would do this with an awk script:
BEGIN {i=0}
(i==0) && /#include/ {print "#include \"newfile.h\""; i=1}
{print $0}
END {}
then run it with awk:
awk -f awkscript headerfile.h > headerfilenew.h
might be sloppy, I'm new to this.
As an alternative suggestion you may want to look at the ed command.
man 1 ed
teststr='
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <inttypes.h>
'
# for in-place file editing use "ed -s file" and replace ",p" with "w"
# cf. http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/howto/edit-ed
cat <<-'EOF' | sed -e 's/^ *//' -e 's/ *$//' | ed -s <(echo "$teststr")
H
/# *include/i
#include "newfile.h"
.
,p
q
EOF
I finally got this to work in a Bash script used to insert a unique timestamp in each item in an RSS feed:
sed "1,/====RSSpermalink====/s/====RSSpermalink====/${nowms}/" \
production-feed2.xml.tmp2 > production-feed2.xml.tmp.$counter
It changes the first occurrence only.
${nowms} is the time in milliseconds set by a Perl script, $counter is a counter used for loop control within the script, \ allows the command to be continued on the next line.
The file is read in and stdout is redirected to a work file.
The way I understand it, 1,/====RSSpermalink====/ tells sed when to stop by setting a range limitation, and then s/====RSSpermalink====/${nowms}/ is the familiar sed command to replace the first string with the second.
In my case I put the command in double quotation marks becauase I am using it in a Bash script with variables.
Using FreeBSD ed and avoid ed's "no match" error in case there is no include statement in a file to be processed:
teststr='
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <inttypes.h>
'
# using FreeBSD ed
# to avoid ed's "no match" error, see
# *emphasized text*http://codesnippets.joyent.com/posts/show/11917
cat <<-'EOF' | sed -e 's/^ *//' -e 's/ *$//' | ed -s <(echo "$teststr")
H
,g/# *include/u\
u\
i\
#include "newfile.h"\
.
,p
q
EOF
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed -si '/#include/{s//& "newfile.h\n&/;:a;$!{n;ba}}' file1 file2 file....
or if memory is not a problem:
sed -si ':a;$!{N;ba};s/#include/& "newfile.h\n&/' file1 file2 file...
If anyone came here to replace a character for the first occurrence in all lines (like myself), use this:
sed '/old/s/old/new/1' file
-bash-4.2$ cat file
123a456a789a
12a34a56
a12
-bash-4.2$ sed '/a/s/a/b/1' file
123b456a789a
12b34a56
b12
By changing 1 to 2 for example, you can replace all the second a's only instead.
The use case can perhaps be that your occurences are spread throughout your file, but you know your only concern is in the first 10, 20 or 100 lines.
Then simply adressing those lines fixes the issue - even if the wording of the OP regards first only.
sed '1,10s/#include/#include "newfile.h"\n#include/'
The following command removes the first occurrence of a string, within a file. It removes the empty line too. It is presented on an xml file, but it would work with any file.
Useful if you work with xml files and you want to remove a tag. In this example it removes the first occurrence of the "isTag" tag.
Command:
sed -e 0,/'<isTag>false<\/isTag>'/{s/'<isTag>false<\/isTag>'//} -e 's/ *$//' -e '/^$/d' source.txt > output.txt
Source file (source.txt)
<xml>
<testdata>
<canUseUpdate>true</canUseUpdate>
<isTag>false</isTag>
<moduleLocations>
<module>esa_jee6</module>
<isTag>false</isTag>
</moduleLocations>
<node>
<isTag>false</isTag>
</node>
</testdata>
</xml>
Result file (output.txt)
<xml>
<testdata>
<canUseUpdate>true</canUseUpdate>
<moduleLocations>
<module>esa_jee6</module>
<isTag>false</isTag>
</moduleLocations>
<node>
<isTag>false</isTag>
</node>
</testdata>
</xml>
ps: it didn't work for me on Solaris SunOS 5.10 (quite old), but it works on Linux 2.6, sed version 4.1.5
Nothing new but perhaps a little more concrete answer: sed -rn '0,/foo(bar).*/ s%%\1%p'
Example: xwininfo -name unity-launcher produces output like:
xwininfo: Window id: 0x2200003 "unity-launcher"
Absolute upper-left X: -2980
Absolute upper-left Y: -198
Relative upper-left X: 0
Relative upper-left Y: 0
Width: 2880
Height: 98
Depth: 24
Visual: 0x21
Visual Class: TrueColor
Border width: 0
Class: InputOutput
Colormap: 0x20 (installed)
Bit Gravity State: ForgetGravity
Window Gravity State: NorthWestGravity
Backing Store State: NotUseful
Save Under State: no
Map State: IsViewable
Override Redirect State: no
Corners: +-2980+-198 -2980+-198 -2980-1900 +-2980-1900
-geometry 2880x98+-2980+-198
Extracting window ID with xwininfo -name unity-launcher|sed -rn '0,/^xwininfo: Window id: (0x[0-9a-fA-F]+).*/ s%%\1%p' produces:
0x2200003
POSIXly (also valid in sed), Only one regex used, need memory only for one line (as usual):
sed '/\(#include\).*/!b;//{h;s//\1 "newfile.h"/;G};:1;n;b1'
Explained:
sed '
/\(#include\).*/!b # Only one regex used. On lines not matching
# the text `#include` **yet**,
# branch to end, cause the default print. Re-start.
//{ # On first line matching previous regex.
h # hold the line.
s//\1 "newfile.h"/ # append ` "newfile.h"` to the `#include` matched.
G # append a newline.
} # end of replacement.
:1 # Once **one** replacement got done (the first match)
n # Loop continually reading a line each time
b1 # and printing it by default.
' # end of sed script.
A possible solution here might be to tell the compiler to include the header without it being mentioned in the source files. IN GCC there are these options:
-include file
Process file as if "#include "file"" appeared as the first line of
the primary source file. However, the first directory searched for
file is the preprocessor's working directory instead of the
directory containing the main source file. If not found there, it
is searched for in the remainder of the "#include "..."" search
chain as normal.
If multiple -include options are given, the files are included in
the order they appear on the command line.
-imacros file
Exactly like -include, except that any output produced by scanning
file is thrown away. Macros it defines remain defined. This
allows you to acquire all the macros from a header without also
processing its declarations.
All files specified by -imacros are processed before all files
specified by -include.
Microsoft's compiler has the /FI (forced include) option.
This feature can be handy for some common header, like platform configuration. The Linux kernel's Makefile uses -include for this.
I needed a solution that would work both on GNU and BSD, and I also knew that the first line would never be the one I'd need to update:
sed -e "1,/pattern/s/pattern/replacement/"
Trying the // feature to not repeat the pattern did not work for me, hence needing to repeat it.
I will make a suggestion that is not exactly what the original question asks for, but for those who also want to specifically replace perhaps the second occurrence of a match, or any other specifically enumerated regular expression match. Use a python script, and a for loop, call it from a bash script if needed. Here's what it looked like for me, where I was replacing specific lines containing the string --project:
def replace_models(file_path, pixel_model, obj_model):
# find your file --project matches
pattern = re.compile(r'--project.*')
new_file = ""
with open(file_path, 'r') as f:
match = 1
for line in f:
# Remove line ending before we do replacement
line = line.strip()
# replace first --project line match with pixel
if match == 1:
result = re.sub(pattern, "--project='" + pixel_model + "'", line)
# replace second --project line match with object
elif match == 2:
result = re.sub(pattern, "--project='" + obj_model + "'", line)
else:
result = line
# Check that a substitution was actually made
if result is not line:
# Add a backslash to the replaced line
result += " \\"
print("\nReplaced ", line, " with ", result)
# Increment number of matches found
match += 1
# Add the potentially modified line to our new file
new_file = new_file + result + "\n"
# close file / save output
f.close()
fout = open(file_path, "w")
fout.write(new_file)
fout.close()
sed -e 's/pattern/REPLACEMENT/1' <INPUTFILE
I'm trying to use sed to clean up lines of URLs to extract just the domain.
So from:
http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/
I want:
http://www.suepearson.co.uk/
(either with or without the trailing slash, it doesn't matter)
I have tried:
sed 's|\(http:\/\/.*?\/\).*|\1|'
and (escaping the non-greedy quantifier)
sed 's|\(http:\/\/.*\?\/\).*|\1|'
but I can not seem to get the non-greedy quantifier (?) to work, so it always ends up matching the whole string.
Neither basic nor extended Posix/GNU regex recognizes the non-greedy quantifier; you need a later regex. Fortunately, Perl regex for this context is pretty easy to get:
perl -pe 's|(http://.*?/).*|\1|'
In this specific case, you can get the job done without using a non-greedy regex.
Try this non-greedy regex [^/]* instead of .*?:
sed 's|\(http://[^/]*/\).*|\1|g'
With sed, I usually implement non-greedy search by searching for anything except the separator until the separator :
echo "http://www.suon.co.uk/product/1/7/3/" | sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*\)/.*;\1;p'
Output:
http://www.suon.co.uk
this is:
don't output -n
search, match pattern, replace and print s/<pattern>/<replace>/p
use ; search command separator instead of / to make it easier to type so s;<pattern>;<replace>;p
remember match between brackets \( ... \), later accessible with \1,\2...
match http://
followed by anything in brackets [], [ab/] would mean either a or b or /
first ^ in [] means not, so followed by anything but the thing in the []
so [^/] means anything except / character
* is to repeat previous group so [^/]* means characters except /.
so far sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*\) means search and remember http://followed by any characters except / and remember what you've found
we want to search untill the end of domain so stop on the next / so add another / at the end: sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*\)/' but we want to match the rest of the line after the domain so add .*
now the match remembered in group 1 (\1) is the domain so replace matched line with stuff saved in group \1 and print: sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*\)/.*;\1;p'
If you want to include backslash after the domain as well, then add one more backslash in the group to remember:
echo "http://www.suon.co.uk/product/1/7/3/" | sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*/\).*;\1;p'
output:
http://www.suon.co.uk/
Simulating lazy (un-greedy) quantifier in sed
And all other regex flavors!
Finding first occurrence of an expression:
POSIX ERE (using -r option)
Regex:
(EXPRESSION).*|.
Sed:
sed -r 's/(EXPRESSION).*|./\1/g' # Global `g` modifier should be on
Example (finding first sequence of digits) Live demo:
$ sed -r 's/([0-9]+).*|./\1/g' <<< 'foo 12 bar 34'
12
How does it work?
This regex benefits from an alternation |. At each position engine tries to pick the longest match (this is a POSIX standard which is followed by couple of other engines as well) which means it goes with . until a match is found for ([0-9]+).*. But order is important too.
Since global flag is set, engine tries to continue matching character by character up to the end of input string or our target. As soon as the first and only capturing group of left side of alternation is matched (EXPRESSION) rest of line is consumed immediately as well .*. We now hold our value in the first capturing group.
POSIX BRE
Regex:
\(\(\(EXPRESSION\).*\)*.\)*
Sed:
sed 's/\(\(\(EXPRESSION\).*\)*.\)*/\3/'
Example (finding first sequence of digits):
$ sed 's/\(\(\([0-9]\{1,\}\).*\)*.\)*/\3/' <<< 'foo 12 bar 34'
12
This one is like ERE version but with no alternation involved. That's all. At each single position engine tries to match a digit.
If it is found, other following digits are consumed and captured and the rest of line is matched immediately otherwise since * means
more or zero it skips over second capturing group \(\([0-9]\{1,\}\).*\)* and arrives at a dot . to match a single character and this process continues.
Finding first occurrence of a delimited expression:
This approach will match the very first occurrence of a string that is delimited. We can call it a block of string.
sed 's/\(END-DELIMITER-EXPRESSION\).*/\1/; \
s/\(\(START-DELIMITER-EXPRESSION.*\)*.\)*/\1/g'
Input string:
foobar start block #1 end barfoo start block #2 end
-EDE: end
-SDE: start
$ sed 's/\(end\).*/\1/; s/\(\(start.*\)*.\)*/\1/g'
Output:
start block #1 end
First regex \(end\).* matches and captures first end delimiter end and substitues all match with recent captured characters which
is the end delimiter. At this stage our output is: foobar start block #1 end.
Then the result is passed to second regex \(\(start.*\)*.\)* that is same as POSIX BRE version above. It matches a single character
if start delimiter start is not matched otherwise it matches and captures the start delimiter and matches the rest of characters.
Directly answering your question
Using approach #2 (delimited expression) you should select two appropriate expressions:
EDE: [^:/]\/
SDE: http:
Usage:
$ sed 's/\([^:/]\/\).*/\1/g; s/\(\(http:.*\)*.\)*/\1/' <<< 'http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/'
Output:
http://www.suepearson.co.uk/
Note: this will not work with identical delimiters.
sed does not support "non greedy" operator.
You have to use "[]" operator to exclude "/" from match.
sed 's,\(http://[^/]*\)/.*,\1,'
P.S. there is no need to backslash "/".
sed - non greedy matching by Christoph Sieghart
The trick to get non greedy matching in sed is to match all characters excluding the one that terminates the match. I know, a no-brainer, but I wasted precious minutes on it and shell scripts should be, after all, quick and easy. So in case somebody else might need it:
Greedy matching
% echo "<b>foo</b>bar" | sed 's/<.*>//g'
bar
Non greedy matching
% echo "<b>foo</b>bar" | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g'
foobar
Non-greedy solution for more than a single character
This thread is really old but I assume people still needs it.
Lets say you want to kill everything till the very first occurrence of HELLO. You cannot say [^HELLO]...
So a nice solution involves two steps, assuming that you can spare a unique word that you are not expecting in the input, say top_sekrit.
In this case we can:
s/HELLO/top_sekrit/ #will only replace the very first occurrence
s/.*top_sekrit// #kill everything till end of the first HELLO
Of course, with a simpler input you could use a smaller word, or maybe even a single character.
HTH!
This can be done using cut:
echo "http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/" | cut -d'/' -f1-3
another way, not using regex, is to use fields/delimiter method eg
string="http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/"
echo $string | awk -F"/" '{print $1,$2,$3}' OFS="/"
sed certainly has its place but this not not one of them !
As Dee has pointed out: Just use cut. It is far simpler and much more safe in this case. Here's an example where we extract various components from the URL using Bash syntax:
url="http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/"
protocol=$(echo "$url" | cut -d':' -f1)
host=$(echo "$url" | cut -d'/' -f3)
urlhost=$(echo "$url" | cut -d'/' -f1-3)
urlpath=$(echo "$url" | cut -d'/' -f4-)
gives you:
protocol = "http"
host = "www.suepearson.co.uk"
urlhost = "http://www.suepearson.co.uk"
urlpath = "product/174/71/3816/"
As you can see this is a lot more flexible approach.
(all credit to Dee)
sed 's|(http:\/\/[^\/]+\/).*|\1|'
There is still hope to solve this using pure (GNU) sed. Despite this is not a generic solution in some cases you can use "loops" to eliminate all the unnecessary parts of the string like this:
sed -r -e ":loop" -e 's|(http://.+)/.*|\1|' -e "t loop"
-r: Use extended regex (for + and unescaped parenthesis)
":loop": Define a new label named "loop"
-e: add commands to sed
"t loop": Jump back to label "loop" if there was a successful substitution
The only problem here is it will also cut the last separator character ('/'), but if you really need it you can still simply put it back after the "loop" finished, just append this additional command at the end of the previous command line:
-e "s,$,/,"
sed -E interprets regular expressions as extended (modern) regular expressions
Update: -E on MacOS X, -r in GNU sed.
Because you specifically stated you're trying to use sed (instead of perl, cut, etc.), try grouping. This circumvents the non-greedy identifier potentially not being recognized. The first group is the protocol (i.e. 'http://', 'https://', 'tcp://', etc). The second group is the domain:
echo "http://www.suon.co.uk/product/1/7/3/" | sed "s|^\(.*//\)\([^/]*\).*$|\1\2|"
If you're not familiar with grouping, start here.
I realize this is an old entry, but someone may find it useful.
As the full domain name may not exceed a total length of 253 characters replace .* with .\{1, 255\}
This is how to robustly do non-greedy matching of multi-character strings using sed. Lets say you want to change every foo...bar to <foo...bar> so for example this input:
$ cat file
ABC foo DEF bar GHI foo KLM bar NOP foo QRS bar TUV
should become this output:
ABC <foo DEF bar> GHI <foo KLM bar> NOP <foo QRS bar> TUV
To do that you convert foo and bar to individual characters and then use the negation of those characters between them:
$ sed 's/#/#A/g; s/{/#B/g; s/}/#C/g; s/foo/{/g; s/bar/}/g; s/{[^{}]*}/<&>/g; s/}/bar/g; s/{/foo/g; s/#C/}/g; s/#B/{/g; s/#A/#/g' file
ABC <foo DEF bar> GHI <foo KLM bar> NOP <foo QRS bar> TUV
In the above:
s/#/#A/g; s/{/#B/g; s/}/#C/g is converting { and } to placeholder strings that cannot exist in the input so those chars then are available to convert foo and bar to.
s/foo/{/g; s/bar/}/g is converting foo and bar to { and } respectively
s/{[^{}]*}/<&>/g is performing the op we want - converting foo...bar to <foo...bar>
s/}/bar/g; s/{/foo/g is converting { and } back to foo and bar.
s/#C/}/g; s/#B/{/g; s/#A/#/g is converting the placeholder strings back to their original characters.
Note that the above does not rely on any particular string not being present in the input as it manufactures such strings in the first step, nor does it care which occurrence of any particular regexp you want to match since you can use {[^{}]*} as many times as necessary in the expression to isolate the actual match you want and/or with seds numeric match operator, e.g. to only replace the 2nd occurrence:
$ sed 's/#/#A/g; s/{/#B/g; s/}/#C/g; s/foo/{/g; s/bar/}/g; s/{[^{}]*}/<&>/2; s/}/bar/g; s/{/foo/g; s/#C/}/g; s/#B/{/g; s/#A/#/g' file
ABC foo DEF bar GHI <foo KLM bar> NOP foo QRS bar TUV
Have not yet seen this answer, so here's how you can do this with vi or vim:
vi -c '%s/\(http:\/\/.\{-}\/\).*/\1/ge | wq' file &>/dev/null
This runs the vi :%s substitution globally (the trailing g), refrains from raising an error if the pattern is not found (e), then saves the resulting changes to disk and quits. The &>/dev/null prevents the GUI from briefly flashing on screen, which can be annoying.
I like using vi sometimes for super complicated regexes, because (1) perl is dead dying, (2) vim has a very advanced regex engine, and (3) I'm already intimately familiar with vi regexes in my day-to-day usage editing documents.
Since PCRE is also tagged here, we could use GNU grep by using non-lazy match in regex .*? which will match first nearest match opposite of .*(which is really greedy and goes till last occurrence of match).
grep -oP '^http[s]?:\/\/.*?/' Input_file
Explanation: using grep's oP options here where -P is responsible for enabling PCRE regex here. In main program of grep mentioning regex which is matching starting http/https followed by :// till next occurrence of / since we have used .*? it will look for first / after (http/https://). It will print matched part only in line.
echo "/home/one/two/three/myfile.txt" | sed 's|\(.*\)/.*|\1|'
don bother, i got it on another forum :)
sed 's|\(http:\/\/www\.[a-z.0-9]*\/\).*|\1| works too
Here is something you can do with a two step approach and awk:
A=http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/
echo $A|awk '
{
var=gensub(///,"||",3,$0) ;
sub(/\|\|.*/,"",var);
print var
}'
Output:
http://www.suepearson.co.uk
Hope that helps!
Another sed version:
sed 's|/[:alnum:].*||' file.txt
It matches / followed by an alphanumeric character (so not another forward slash) as well as the rest of characters till the end of the line. Afterwards it replaces it with nothing (ie. deletes it.)
#Daniel H (concerning your comment on andcoz' answer, although long time ago): deleting trailing zeros works with
s,([[:digit:]]\.[[:digit:]]*[1-9])[0]*$,\1,g
it's about clearly defining the matching conditions ...
You should also think about the case where there is no matching delims. Do you want to output the line or not. My examples here do not output anything if there is no match.
You need prefix up to 3rd /, so select two times string of any length not containing / and following / and then string of any length not containing / and then match / following any string and then print selection. This idea works with any single char delims.
echo http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/ | \
sed -nr 's,(([^/]*/){2}[^/]*)/.*,\1,p'
Using sed commands you can do fast prefix dropping or delim selection, like:
echo 'aaa #cee: { "foo":" #cee: " }' | \
sed -r 't x;s/ #cee: /\n/;D;:x'
This is lot faster than eating char at a time.
Jump to label if successful match previously. Add \n at / before 1st delim. Remove up to first \n. If \n was added, jump to end and print.
If there is start and end delims, it is just easy to remove end delims until you reach the nth-2 element you want and then do D trick, remove after end delim, jump to delete if no match, remove before start delim and and print. This only works if start/end delims occur in pairs.
echo 'foobar start block #1 end barfoo start block #2 end bazfoo start block #3 end goo start block #4 end faa' | \
sed -r 't x;s/end//;s/end/\n/;D;:x;s/(end).*/\1/;T y;s/.*(start)/\1/;p;:y;d'
If you have access to gnu grep, then can utilize perl regex:
grep -Po '^https?://([^/]+)(?=)' <<< 'http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/'
http://www.suepearson.co.uk
Alternatively, to get everything after the domain use
grep -Po '^https?://([^/]+)\K.*' <<< 'http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/'
/product/174/71/3816/
The following solution works for matching / working with multiply present (chained; tandem; compound) HTML or other tags. For example, I wanted to edit HTML code to remove <span> tags, that appeared in tandem.
Issue: regular sed regex expressions greedily matched over all the tags from the first to the last.
Solution: non-greedy pattern matching (per discussions elsewhere in this thread; e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/a/46719361/1904943).
Example:
echo '<span>Will</span>This <span>remove</span>will <span>this.</span>remain.' | \
sed 's/<span>[^>]*>//g' ; echo
This will remain.
Explanation:
s/<span> : find <span>
[^>] : followed by anything that is not >
*> : until you find >
//g : replace any such strings present with nothing.
Addendum
I was trying to clean up URLs, but I was running into difficulty matching / excluding a word - href - using the approach above. I briefly looked at negative lookarounds (Regular expression to match a line that doesn't contain a word) but that approach seemed overly complex and did not provide a satisfactory solution.
I decided to replace href with ` (backtick), do the regex substitutions, then replace ` with href.
Example (formatted here for readability):
printf '\n
<a aaa h href="apple">apple</a>
<a bbb "c=ccc" href="banana">banana</a>
<a class="gtm-content-click"
data-vars-link-text="nope"
data-vars-click-url="https://blablabla"
data-vars-event-category="story"
data-vars-sub-category="story"
data-vars-item="in_content_link"
data-vars-link-text
href="https:example.com">Example.com</a>\n\n' |
sed 's/href/`/g ;
s/<a[^`]*`/\n<a href/g'
apple
banana
Example.com
Explanation: basically as above. Here,
s/href/` : replace href with ` (backtick)
s/<a : find start of URL
[^`] : followed by anything that is not ` (backtick)
*` : until you find a `
/<a href/g : replace each of those found with <a href
Unfortunately, as mentioned, this it is not supported in sed.
To overcome this, I suggest to use the next best thing(actually better even), to use vim sed-like capabilities.
define in .bash-profile
vimdo() { vim $2 --not-a-term -c "$1" -es +"w >> /dev/stdout" -cq! ; }
That will create headless vim to execute a command.
Now you can do for example:
echo $PATH | vimdo "%s_\c:[a-zA-Z0-9\\/]\{-}python[a-zA-Z0-9\\/]\{-}:__g" -
to filter out python in $PATH.
Use - to have input from pipe in vimdo.
While most of the syntax is the same. Vim features more advanced features, and using \{-} is standard for non-greedy match. see help regexp.