I'm trying to replace a space between two alphanumeric characters and have come up with this:
sed -i -e '/^device/ s/[0-9a-zA-Z]\s[0-9a-zA-Z]/g' file.txt
Where file.txt looks like :
device : Nxx2k PNP#0.6
device : Pdot3 ICB#2.5
etc. I'd like for the spaces between the strings to the right of the colon to be replaced with an underscore _
device : Nxx2k_PNP#0.6
device : Pdot3_ICB#2.5
This command replaces the space and the two surrounding characters with the underscore. How can i make it such that only the space is repalced? Thanks
You can use capturing groups to preserve the alphanumeric characters around the space:
sed -i -e '/^device/ s/\([0-9a-zA-Z]\) \([0-9a-zA-Z]\)/\1_\2/' file.txt
I used a space instead of \s because you wrote to replace "space",
and not "whitespace".
Also, \s is not supported with all versions of sed, so it's not portable (doesn't work with BSD sed).
Finally, I dropped the g flag because it's unnecessary in your examples.
If in your real use case you want to replace multiple spaces on one line,
then of course you should add it back.
Related
The goal is to use sed to return only the url from each line of FF extension Mining Blocker which uses this format for its regex lines:
{"baseurl":"*://002.0x1f4b0.com/*", "suburl":"*://*/002.0x1f4b0.com/*"},
{"baseurl":"*://003.0x1f4b0.com/*", "suburl":"*://*/003.0x1f4b0.com/*"},
the result should be:
002.0x1f4b0.com
003.0x1f4b0.com
One way would be to keep everything after suburl":"*://*/ then remove each occurrence of /*"},
I found https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/24140/return-only-the-portion-of-a-line-after-a-matching-pattern but the special characters are a problem.
this won't work:
sed -n -e s#^.*suburl":"*://*/##g hosts
Would someone please show me how to mark the 2 asterisks in the string so they are seen by regex as literal characters, not wildcards?
edit:
sed -n 's#.*://\*/\([^/]\+\)/.*#\1#p' hosts
doesn't work, unfortunately.
regarding character substitution, thanks for directing me to the references.
I reduced the searched-for string to //*/ and used ASCII character codes like this:
sed -n -e s#^.*\d047\d047\d042\d047##g hosts
Unfortunately, that didn't output any changes to the lines.
My assumptions are:
^.*something specifies everything up to and including the last occurrence of "something" in a line
sed -n -e s#search##g deletes (replace with nothing) "search" within a line
So, this line:
sed -n -e s#^.*\d047\d047\d042\d047##g hosts
Should output everything after //*/ in each line...except it doesn't.
What is incorrect with that line?
Regarding deleting everything including and after the first / AFTER that first operation, yes, that's wanted too.
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed -n 's#.*://\*/\([^/]\+\)/.*#\1#p' file
Match greedily (the longest string that matches) all characters up to ://*/, followed by a group of characters (which will be referred to as \1) that do not match a /, followed by the rest of the line and replace it by the group \1.
N.B. the sed substitution delimiters are arbitrary, in this case chosen to be # so as make pattern matching / easier. Also the character * on the left hand side of the substitution command may be interpreted as a meta character that means zero or more of the previous character/group and so is quoted \* so that it does not mistakenly exert this property. Finally, using the option -n toggles off the usual printing of every thing in the pattern space after all the sed commands have been executed. The p flag on the substitution command, prints the pattern space following a successful substitution, therefore only URL's will appear in the output or nothing.
I have a simple sed command that I am using to replace everything between (and including) //thistest.com-- and --thistest.com with nothing (remove the block all together):
sudo sed -i "s#//thistest\.com--.*--thistest\.com##g" my.file
The contents of my.file are:
//thistest.com--
zone "awebsite.com" {
type master;
file "some.stuff.com.hosts";
};
//--thistest.com
As I am using # as my delimiter for the regex, I don't need to escape the / characters. I am also properly (I think) escaping the . in .com. So I don't see exactly what is failing.
Why isn't the entire block being replaced?
You have two problems:
Sed doesn't do multiline pattern matches—at least, not the way you're expecting it to. However, you can use multiline addresses as an alternative.
Depending on your version of sed, you may need to escape alternate delimiters, especially if you aren't using them solely as part of a substitution expression.
So, the following will work with your posted corpus in both GNU and BSD flavors:
sed '\#^//thistest\.com--#, \#^//--thistest\.com# d' /tmp/corpus
Note that in this version, we tell sed to match all lines between (and including) the two patterns. The opening delimiter of each address pattern is properly escaped. The command has also been changed to d for delete instead of s for substitute, and some whitespace was added for readability.
I've also chosen to anchor the address patterns to the start of each line. You may or may not find that helpful with this specific corpus, but it's generally wise to do so when you can, and doesn't seem to hurt your use case.
# separation by line with 1 s//
sed -n -e 'H;${x;s#^\(.\)\(.*\)\1//thistest.com--.*\1//--thistest.com#\2#;p}' YourFile
# separation by line with address pattern
sed -e '\#//thistest.com--#,\#//--thistest.com# d' YourFile
# separation only by char (could be CR, CR/LF, ";" or "oneline") with s//
sed -n -e '1h;1!H;${x;s#//thistest.com--.*\1//--thistest.com##;p}' YourFile
Note:
assuming there is only 1 section thistest per file (if not, it remove anything between the first opening until the last closing section) for the use of s//
does not suite for huge file (load entire file into memory) with s//
sed using addresses pattern cannot select section on the same line, it search 1st pattern to start, and a following line to stop but very efficient on big file and/or multisection
I want to remove last 2 words in the string which is in a file.
I am using this command first to delete the last word. But I couldn't do it. can someone help me
sed 's/\w*$//' <file name>
my strings are like this
Input:
asbc/jahsf/jhdsflk/jsfh/ -0.001 (exam)
I want to remove both numerical value and the one in brackets.
Output:
asbc/jahsf/jhdsflk/jsfh/
Using GNU sed:
$ sed -r 's/([[:space:]]+[-+.()[:alnum:]]+){2}$//' file
asbc/jahsf/jhdsflk/jsfh/
How it works
[[:space:]]+ matches one or more spaces.
[-+.()[:alnum:]]+ matches the 'words' which are allowed to contain any number of plus or minus signs, periods, parens, or any alphanumeric characters.
Note that, when a period is inside square brackets, [.], it is just a period, not a wildcard: it does not need to be escaped.
([[:space:]]+[-+.()[:alnum:]]+) matches one or more spaces followed by a word.
([[:space:]]+[-+.()[:alnum:]]+){2}$ matches two words and the spaces which precede them.
Note the use of character classes like [:space:] and [:alnum:]. Unlike the old-fashioned classes like [a-zA-Z0-9], these classes are unicode safe.
OSX (BSD) sed
The above was tested on GNU sed. For BSD sed, try:
sed -E 's/([[:space:]][[:space:]]*[-+.()[:alnum:][:alnum:]]*){2}$//' file
To remove everything that follows a number with decimal places
This looks for a decimal number with optional sign and removes it, the spaces which precede it, and everything which follows it:
$ sed -r 's/[[:space:]]+[-+]?[[:digit:]]+[.][[:digit:]]+[[:space:]].*//' file
asbc/jahsf/jhdsflk/jsfh/
How it works:
[[:space:]]+ matches one or more spaces
[-+]? matches zero or one signs.
[[:digit:]]+ matches any number of digits.
[.] matches a decimal point (period).
[[:digit:]]+ matches one or more digits following the decimal point.
[[:space:]] matches a space following the number.
.* matches anything which follows.
It looks like there is a tab between what you want to keep and what you want to get rid of. I don't have linux in front of me but try this.
sed 's/\t.*//'
This is assuming your strings are always formatted similarily which is what I take from your comment.
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed -r 's/\s+\S+\s+\S+\s*$//' file
or if you prefer:
sed -r 's/(\s+\S+){2}\s*$//' file
This matches and removes: one or more whitespaces followed by one or more non-whitespaces twice followed by zero or more whitespaces at the end of the line.
I'm having issues matching strings even if they start with any number of white spaces. It's been very little time since I started using regular expressions, so I need some help
Here is an example. I have a file (file.txt) that contains two lines
#String1='Test One'
String1='Test Two'
Im trying to change the value for the second line, without affecting line 1 so I used this
sed -i "s|String1=.*$|String1='Test Three'|g"
This changes the values for both lines. How can I make sed change only the value of the second string?
Thank you
With gnu sed, you match spaces using \s, while other sed implementations usually work with the [[:space:]] character class. So, pick one of these:
sed 's/^\s*AWord/AnotherWord/'
sed 's/^[[:space:]]*AWord/AnotherWord/'
Since you're using -i, I assume GNU sed. Either way, you probably shouldn't retype your word, as that introduces the chance of a typo. I'd go with:
sed -i "s/^\(\s*String1=\).*/\1'New Value'/" file
Move the \s* outside of the parens if you don't want to preserve the leading whitespace.
There are a couple of solutions you could use to go about your problem
If you want to ignore lines that begin with a comment character such as '#' you could use something like this:
sed -i "/^\s*#/! s|String1=.*$|String1='Test Three'|g" file.txt
which will only operate on lines that do not match the regular expression /.../! that begins ^ with optional whiltespace\s* followed by an octothorp #
The other option is to include the characters before 'String' as part of the substitution. Doing it this way means you'll need to capture \(...\) the group to include it in the output with \1
sed -i "s|^\(\s*\)String1=.*$|\1String1='Test Four'|g" file.txt
With GNU sed, try:
sed -i "s|^\s*String1=.*$|String1='Test Three'|" file
or
sed -i "/^\s*String1=/s/=.*/='Test Three'/" file
Using awk you could do:
awk '/String1/ && f++ {$2="Test Three"}1' FS=\' OFS=\' file
#String1='Test One'
String1='Test Three'
It will ignore first hits of string1 since f is not true.
Is there a way to substitute only within the match space using sed?
I.e. given the following line, is there a way to substitute only the "." chars that are contained within the matching single quotes and protect the "." chars that are not enclosed by single quotes?
Input:
'ECJ-4YF1H10.6Z' ! 'CAP' ! '10.0uF' ! 'TOL' ; MGCDC1008.S1 MGCDC1009.A2
Desired result:
'ECJ-4YF1H10-6Z' ! 'CAP' ! '10_0uF' ! 'TOL' ; MGCDC1008.S1 MGCDC1009.A2
Or is this just a job to which perl or awk might be better suited?
Thanks for your help,
Mark
Give the following a try which uses the divide-and-conquer technique:
sed "s/\('[^']*'\)/\n&\n/g;s/\(\n'[^.]*\)\.\([^']*Z'\)/\1-\2/g;s/\(\n'[^.]*\)\.\([^']*uF'\)/\1_\2/g;s/\n//g" inputfile
Explanation:
s/\('[^']*'\)/\n&\n/g - Add newlines before and after each pair of single quotes with their contents
s/\(\n'[^.]*\)\.\([^']*Z'\)/\1-\2/g - Using a newline and the single quotes to key on, replace the dot with a dash for strings that end in "Z"
s/\(\n'[^.]*\)\.\([^']*uF'\)/\1_\2/g - Using a newline and the single quotes to key on, replace the dot with a dash for strings that end in "uF"
s/\n//g - Remove the newlines added in the first step
You can restrict the command to acting only on certain lines:
sed "/foo/{s/\('[^']*'\)/\n&\n/g;s/\(\n'[^.]*\)\.\([^']*Z'\)/\1-\2/g;s/\(\n'[^.]*\)\.\([^']*uF'\)/\1_\2/g;s/\n//g}" inputfile
where you would substitute some regex in place of "foo".
Some versions of sed like to be spoon fed (instead of semicolons between commands, use -e):
sed -e "/foo/{s/\('[^']*'\)/\n&\n/g" -e "s/\(\n'[^.]*\)\.\([^']*Z'\)/\1-\2/g" -e "s/\(\n'[^.]*\)\.\([^']*uF'\)/\1_\2/g" -e "s/\n//g}" inputfile
$ cat phoo1234567_sedFix.sed
#! /bin/sed -f
/'[0-9][0-9]\.[0-9][a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z]'/s/'\([0-9][0-9]\)\.\([0-9][a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z]\)'/\1_\2/
This answers your specific question. If the pattern you need to fix isn't always like the example you provided, they you'll need multiple copies of this line, with reg-expressions modified to match your new change targets.
Note that the cmd is in 2 parts, "/'[0-9][0-9].[0-9][a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z]'/" says, must match lines with this pattern, while the trailing "s/'([0-9][0-9]).([0-9][a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z])'/\1_\2/", is the part that does the substitution. You can add a 'g' after the final '/' to make this substitution happen on all instances of this pattern in each line.
The \(\) pairs in match pattern get converted into the numbered buffers on the substitution side of the command (i.e. \1 \2). This is what gives sed power that awk doesn't have.
If your going to do much of this kind of work, I highly recommend O'Rielly's Sed And Awk book. The time spent going thru how sed works will be paid back many times.
I hope this helps.
P.S. as you appear to be a new user, if you get an answer that helps you please remember to mark it as accepted, or give it a + (or -) as a useful answer.
this is a job most suitable for awk or any language that supports breaking/splitting strings.
IMO, using sed for this task, which is regex based , while doable, is difficult to read and debug, hence not the most appropriate tool for the job. No offense to sed fanatics.
awk '{
for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) {
if ($i ~ /\047/ ){
gsub(".","_",$i)
}
}
}1' file
The above says for each field (field seperator by default is white space), check to see if there is a single quote, and if there is , substitute the "." to "_". This method is simple and doesn't need complicated regex.