Replace game1 with game001 with sed nested commands - sed

Question

cat 1.txt | sed -E 's,game([0-9]+),game$(printf %03d \1),g'
to replace 1.txt from:
game1 xxx vs yyy
game11 aaa vs bbb
to:
game001 xxx vs yyy
game011 aaa vs bbb
but the result is:
$ echo "game1 xxx vs yyy" | sed -E 's,game([0-9]+),game$(printf %03d \1),g'
game$(printf %03d 1) xxx vs yyy
How to make printf %03d \1 correctly evaluated?

Answer 1

You need to use double quotes when you need substitution
sed -E "s,game([0-9]+),game$(printf %03d \1),g" 1.txt
Edit:
And, I don't think sed can pass value of \1 to external commands. perl can help in this case:
$ cat 1.txt
game1 xxx vs yyy
game11 aaa vs bbb
game21 aaa vs bbb
$ sed -E "s,game([0-9]+),game$(printf %03d \1),g" 1.txt
game001 xxx vs yyy
game001 aaa vs bbb
game001 aaa vs bbb
$ # can also use: perl -pe 's/game\K\d+/sprintf "%03d", $&/ge'
$ perl -pe 's/game([0-9]+)/sprintf "game%03d", $1/ge' 1.txt
game001 xxx vs yyy
game011 aaa vs bbb
game021 aaa vs bbb

Answer 2

You can't combine shell commands and sed backreferences like this (and if you could, you'd have to double quote the sed command, see other answer). The shell would try to evaluate the command before sed sees it, but \1 wouldn't mean anything to the shell.
You can do it as follows, though:
$ sed -E 's/^(game)([[:digit:]]+)/\100\2/;s/^(game).{0,2}([[:digit:]]{3})/\1\2/' 1.txt
game001 xxx vs yyy
game011 aaa vs bbb
The first substitution, s/^(game)([[:digit:]]+)/\100\2/, adds two zeros in front of the digits after game:
$ sed -E 's/game([[:digit:]]+)/game00\1/' 1.txt
game001 xxx vs yyy
game0011 aaa vs bbb
The second substitution, s/^(game).{0,2}([[:digit:]]{3})/\1\2/ removes up to two characters between game and three digits that follow it, to get rid of unwanted extra zeros.
Notice that
I've used / instead of , as delimiter, just because I'm more used to it.
I've anchored game at the start of the line with ^.
I've used one more capture group for game so I don't have to type it twice per command.
I've used the POSIX character class [[:digit:]] instead of [0-9].
I've used sed '<command>' 1.txt instead of cat 1.txt | sed '<command>' to avoid the useless use of cat.

Answer 3

Just use awk:
$ awk '{sub(/game/,""); $1=sprintf("game%03d",$1)} 1' file
game001 xxx vs yyy
game011 aaa vs bbb
or in general to operate on saved capture groups with GNU awk for the 3rd arg to match():
$ awk 'match($0,/(game)([0-9]+)(.*)/,a){ printf "%s%03d%s\n", a[1], a[2], a[3] }' file
game001 xxx vs yyy
game011 aaa vs bbb
With sed you'd need:
$ sed -E 's/(game)([0-9]) /\10\2 /; s/(game)([0-9]{2}) /\10\2 /' file
game001 xxx vs yyy
game011 aaa vs bbb