How to remove after second period in a string using sed - sed

In my script, have a possible version number: 15.03.2 set to variable $STRING. These numbers always change. I want to strip it down to: 15.03 (or whatever it will be next time).
How do I remove everything after the second . using sed?
Something like:
$(echo "$STRING" | sed "s/\.^$\.//")
(I don't know what ^, $ and others do, but they look related, so I just guessed.)

I think the better tool here is cut
echo '15.03.2' | cut -d . -f -2

This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed 's/\.[^.]*//2g' file
Remove the second or more occurrence of a period followed by zero or non-period character(s).

$ echo '15.03.2' | sed 's/\([^.]*\.[^.]*\)\..*/\1/'
15.03
More generally to skip N periods:
$ echo '15.03.2.3.4.5' | sed -E 's/(([^.]*\.){2}[^.]*)\..*/\1/'
15.03.2
$ echo '15.03.2.3.4.5' | sed -E 's/(([^.]*\.){3}[^.]*)\..*/\1/'
15.03.2.3
$ echo '15.03.2.3.4.5' | sed -E 's/(([^.]*\.){4}[^.]*)\..*/\1/'
15.03.2.3.4

Related

Using a single sed call to split and grep

This is mostly by curiosity, I am trying to have the same behavior as:
echo -e "test1:test2:test3"| sed 's/:/\n/g' | grep 1
in a single sed command.
I already tried
echo -e "test1:test2:test3"| sed -e "s/:/\n/g" -n "/1/p"
But I get the following error:
sed: can't read /1/p: No such file or directory
Any idea on how to fix this and combine different types of commands into a single sed call?
Of course this is overly simplified compared to the real usecase, and I know I can get around by using multiple calls, again this is just out of curiosity.
EDIT: I am mostly interested in the sed tool, I already know how to do it using other tools, or even combinations of those.
EDIT2: Here is a more realistic script, closer to what I am trying to achieve:
arch=linux64
base=https://chromedriver.storage.googleapis.com
split="<Contents>"
curl $base \
| sed -e 's/<Contents>/<Contents>\n/g' \
| grep $arch \
| sed -e 's/^<Key>\(.*\)\/chromedriver.*/\1/' \
| sort -V > out
What I would like to simplify is the curl line, turning it into something like:
curl $base \
| sed 's/<Contents>/<Contents>\n/g' -n '/1/p' -e 's/^<Key>\(.*\)\/chromedriver.*/\1/' \
| sort -V > out
Here are some alternatives, awk and sed based:
sed -E "s/(.*:)?([^:]*1[^:]*).*/\2/" <<< "test1:test2:test3"
awk -v RS=":" '/1/' <<< "test1:test2:test3"
# or also
awk 'BEGIN{RS=":"} /1/' <<< "test1:test2:test3"
Or, using your logic, you would need to pipe a second sed command:
sed "s/:/\n/g" <<< "test1:test2:test3" | sed -n "/1/p"
See this online demo. The awk solution looks cleanest.
Details
In sed solution, (.*:)?([^:]*1[^:]*).* pattern matches an optional sequence of any 0+ chars and a :, then captures into Group 2 any 0 or more chars other than :, 1, again 0 or more chars other than :, and then just matches the rest of the line. The replacement just keeps Group 2 contents.
In awk solution, the record separator is set to : and then /1/ regex is used to only return the record having 1 in it.
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed 's/:/\n/;/^[^\n]*1/P;D' file
Replace each : and if the first line in the pattern space contains 1 print it.
Repeat.
An alternative:
sed -Ez 's/:/\n/g;s/^[^1]*$//mg;s/\n+/\n/;s/^\n//' file
This slurps the whole file into memory and replaces all colons by newlines. All lines that do not contain 1 are removed and surplus newlines deleted.
An alternative to the really ugly sed is: grep -o '\w*2\w*'
$ printf "test1:test2:test3\nbob3:bob2:fred2\n" | grep -o '\w*2\w*'
test2
bob2
fred2
grep -o: only matching
Or: grep -o '[^:]*2[^:]*'
echo -e "test1:test2:test3" | sed -En 's/:/\n/g;/^[^\n]*2[^\n]*(\n|$)/P;//!D'
sed -n doesn't print unless told to
sed -E allows using parens to match (\n|$) which is newline or the end of the pattern space
P prints the pattern buffer up to the first newline.
D trims the pattern buffer up to the first newline
[^\n] is a character class that matches anything except a newline
// is sed shorthand for repeating a match
//! is then matching everything that didn't match previously
So, after you split into newlines, you want to make sure the 2 character is between the start of the pattern buffer ^ and the first newline.
And, if there is not the character you are looking for, you want to D delete up to the first newline.
At that point, it works for one line of input, with one string containing the character you're looking for.
To expand to several matches within a line, you have to ta, conditionally branch back to label :a:
$ printf "test1:test2:test3\nbob3:bob2:fred2\n" | \
sed -En ':a s/:/\n/g;/^[^\n]*2[^\n]*(\n|$)/P;D;ta'
test2
bob2
fred2
This is simply NOT a job for sed. With GNU awk for multi-char RS:
$ echo "test1:test2:test3:test4:test5:test6"| awk -v RS='[:\n]' '/1/'
test1
$ echo "test1:test2:test3:test4:test5:test6"| awk -v RS='[:\n]' 'NR%2'
test1
test3
test5
$ echo "test1:test2:test3:test4:test5:test6"| awk -v RS='[:\n]' '!(NR%2)'
test2
test4
test6
$ echo "foo1:bar1:foo2:bar2:foo3:bar3" | awk -v RS='[:\n]' '/foo/ || /2/'
foo1
foo2
bar2
foo3
With any awk you'd just have to strip the \n from the final record before operating on it:
$ echo "test1:test2:test3:test4:test5:test6"| awk -v RS=':' '{sub(/\n$/,"")} /1/'
test1

How to replace only last match in a line with sed?

With sed, I can replace the first match in a line using
sed 's/pattern/replacement/'
And all matches using
sed 's/pattern/replacement/g'
How do I replace only the last match, regardless of how many matches there are before it?
Copy pasting from something I've posted elsewhere:
$ # replacing last occurrence
$ # can also use sed -E 's/:([^:]*)$/-\1/'
$ echo 'foo:123:bar:baz' | sed -E 's/(.*):/\1-/'
foo:123:bar-baz
$ echo '456:foo:123:bar:789:baz' | sed -E 's/(.*):/\1-/'
456:foo:123:bar:789-baz
$ echo 'foo and bar and baz land good' | sed -E 's/(.*)and/\1XYZ/'
foo and bar and baz lXYZ good
$ # use word boundaries as necessary - GNU sed
$ echo 'foo and bar and baz land good' | sed -E 's/(.*)\band\b/\1XYZ/'
foo and bar XYZ baz land good
$ # replacing last but one
$ echo 'foo:123:bar:baz' | sed -E 's/(.*):(.*:)/\1-\2/'
foo:123-bar:baz
$ echo '456:foo:123:bar:789:baz' | sed -E 's/(.*):(.*:)/\1-\2/'
456:foo:123:bar-789:baz
$ # replacing last but two
$ echo '456:foo:123:bar:789:baz' | sed -E 's/(.*):((.*:){2})/\1-\2/'
456:foo:123-bar:789:baz
$ # replacing last but three
$ echo '456:foo:123:bar:789:baz' | sed -E 's/(.*):((.*:){3})/\1-\2/'
456:foo-123:bar:789:baz
Further Reading:
Buggy behavior if word boundaries is used inside a group with quanitifiers - for example: echo 'it line with it here sit too' | sed -E 's/with(.*\bit\b){2}/XYZ/' fails
Greedy vs. Reluctant vs. Possessive Quantifiers
Reference - What does this regex mean?
sed manual: Back-references and Subexpressions
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed 's/\(.*\)pattern/\1replacement/' file
Use greed to swallow up the pattern space and then regexp engine will step back through the line and find the first match i.e. the last match.
A fun way to do this, is to use rev to reverse the characters of each line and write your sed replacement backwards.
rev input_file | sed 's/nrettap/tnemecalper/' | rev

I want to extract specific char by using sed command

I want to extract /battle/result from following the txt file
$ cat sample
user_id=1234 /battle/start
I run following the sed command
$ cat sample | sed 's|.*\(/.*\)|\1|g'
/start
But, result is deleting /battle, so I can't extract it as I want.
What is wrong with it?
You can remove all characters up to last space:
$ sed 's/.* //' <<< "user_id=1234 /battle/start"
/battle/start
or use cut:
$ cut -d' ' -f2 <<< "user_id=1234 /battle/start"
/battle/start
Sed tries to do a greedy (maximal) match, therefore .* matches your whole line up to but not including the second /.
Try:
< sample sed 's|.* \(/.*\)|\1|g'
or
< sample sed 's|[^/]*\(/.*\)|\1|g'
In your RE the .* is greedy and swallows the /battle part, you could try to invert the logic and delete everything in front of /:
cat sample | sed 's/[^/]*//'
Here [^/]* matches everthing that is not a / and replaces it with nothing.
echo user_id=1234 /battle/start |grep -oP '\s\K.*'
/battle/start
echo user_id=1234 /battle/start |sed -r 's/(^.*\s)(.*)/\2/g'
/battle/start

How to use a sed one-liner to parse "rec:id=1&name=zz&age=21" into "1 zz 21"?

I can chain multiple sed substitutions and a awk operation to achieve this, but is there a single sed substitution that can do it?
Also is there any other tool that is more suitable for this parsing task?
You could try:
sed -r 's!rec:id=(.*?)&name=(.*?)&age=(.*?)!\1 \2 \3!' input_file
If you don't know the rec:id etc in advance but you know there's three, you could try:
sed -r 's![^=]+=(.*?)&[^=]+=(.*?)&[^=]+=(.*?)!\1 \2 \3!' input_file
If you don't know how many &name=value pairs you're after in advance but want to output all the values, you could try something like:
grep -P -o '(?<==)([^&]*)(?=&|$)' | xargs
where the -P means 'perl regex', the regex says "find the string followed by an & (or end of string) and preceded by and equals sign", the -o means to print just the matches (ie the 1, zz, and 21) each on their own line, and the | xargs moves these from their own line to one line and space separated (ie 1\nzz\n21 to 1 zz 21).
This might work for you:
echo "rec:id=1&name=zz&age=21" | sed 's/[^=]*=\([^&]*\)/\1 /g'
1 zz 21
However this leaves an extra space at the end, to solve this use:
echo "rec:id=1&name=zz&age=21"|sed 's/[^=]*=\([^&]*\)/\1 /g:;s/ $//'
1 zz 21
How about parsing the values directly into variables?
inbound="rec:id=1&name=zz&age=21"
eval $(echo $inbound | cut -c5- | tr \& "\n")
echo "Name:$name, ID:$id, Age:$age"
Or even better, though slightly more arcane:
inbound="rec:id=1&name=zz&age=21"
IFS=\& eval $(cut -c5- <<< $inbound)
echo "Name:$name, ID:$id, Age:$age"

Trim text using sed

How do I remove the first and the last quotes?
echo "\"test\"" | sed 's/"//' | sed 's/"$//'
The above is working as expected, But I guess there must be a better way.
You can combine the sed calls into one:
echo "\"test\"" | sed 's/"//;s/"$//'
The command you posted will remove the first quote even if it's not at the beginning of the line. If you want to make sure that it's only done if it is at the beginning, then you can anchor it like this:
echo "\"test\"" | sed 's/^"//;s/"$//'
Some versions of sed don't like multiple commands separated by semicolons. For them you can do this (it also works in the ones that accept semicolons):
echo "\"test\"" | sed -e 's/^"//' -e 's/"$//'
Maybe you prefer something like this:
echo '"test"' | sed 's/^"\(.*\)"$/\1/'
if you are sure there are no other quotes besides the first and last, just use /g modifier
$ echo "\"test\"" | sed 's/"//g'
test
If you have Ruby(1.9+)
$ echo $s
blah"te"st"test
$ echo $s | ruby -e 's=gets.split("\"");print "#{s[0]}#{s[1..-2].join("\"")+s[-1]}"'
blahte"sttest
Note the 2nd example the first and last quotes which may not be exactly at the first and last positions.
example with more quotes
$ s='bl"ah"te"st"tes"t'
$ echo $s | ruby -e 's=gets.split("\"");print "#{s[0]}#{s[1..-2].join("\"")+s[-1]}"'
blah"te"st"test