Bash SED string replacement - removes characters before and after Regex - regex

I have this simple bash (3) script to scan through all the files in the directory and replace some old CSS classes with new ones.
export LC_ALL=C
ARRAY=(
"a-oldclass:new-class"
"m-oldclass:new-class"
)
for className in "${ARRAY[#]}" ; do
REGEX=[^a-zA-Z0-9]${className%%:*}[^a-zA-Z0-9]
CHANGE="s/${REGEX}/${className##*:}/g"
find src -type f -exec sed -i '' "${CHANGE}" '{}' +
done
It is a combination of key:value pairs and a regular expression.
The problem is that it also removes special characters before and after the matching pattern, like:
class="a-oldclass" => class=new-class (Quotes are gone)
class=" a-oldclass " => class="new-class" (spaces are gone)
I need this outcome:
class="a-oldclass m-oldclass" => class="new-class new-class".
[^a-zA-Z0-9] is necessary to avoid this scenario:
I want to replace a-oldclass with new-class, but I don't want to touch class data-oldclass. Since this string contains a-oldclass it would be modified. So with [^a-zA-Z0-9] I exclude this kind of scenarios.

This should be the regular expression:
REGEX='\([^a-zA-Z0-9]\)'"${className%%:*}"'\([^a-zA-Z0-9]\)'
CHANGE="s/${REGEX}/\1${className##*:}\2/g"
This uses \( \) and \1 \2 to reproduce the matches before and after the classname.
Additionally, I recommend against using all-capital-variables as they may conflict with BASH default variables.
In case you also need to match newline terminated strings, you can add
REGEX='\([^a-zA-Z0-9]\)'"${className%%:*}"'\([^a-zA-Z0-9]\)'
CHANGE="s/${REGEX}/\1${className##*:}\2/g"
REGEXNL='\([^a-zA-Z0-9]\)'"${className%%:*}"'$'
CHANGENL="s/${REGEXNL}/\1${className##*:}/g"
and change the sed command to
sed -i -e "${CHANGE}" -e "${CHANGENL}"
I bet there is a more elegant solution, but this sed survived the -posix test.

Related

bash recursive manipulation of strings in a subset of files in all subdirectories

In a directory there are a lot of (sub)subdirectories with different files. The string manipulation shall be executed on one file type (e.g. *.c) only.
The string I'd like to manipulate has the following structure:
[text][string before specific underscore]_[string after specific underscore]_[string rest][text]
[text] can be [a-z], [A-Z], [0-9], _ or space.
[string before specific underscore] can be [a-z], [A-Z], [0-9].
[string after specific underscore] is known. Lets assume it is 'MOVE'.
[string rest] can be [a-z], [A-Z], [0-9] or _.
My goal is to change the two strings left and right to first underscore:
[text][string after specific underscore]_[string before specific underscore]_[string rest][text]
Example of one c file:
h_a1Ha MOVE_Ab1_rest h _4Aihi
bl_aa abc123ABC_MOVE_rest bl_ub
blu_b abcABC_MOVE_rest bla_a
foo _o Abc_MOVE_rest tes _t
I want to change MOVE with the expression before first underscore:
h_a1Ha MOVE_Ab1_rest h _4Aihi
bl_aa MOVE_abc123ABC_rest bl_ub
blu_b MOVE_abcABC_rest bla_a
foo _o MOVE_Abc_rest tes _t
When all expressions before first underscore are known this works:
find . -name "*.c" -exec sed -i "s/abc123ABC_MOVE_/MOVE_abc123ABC_/g" '{}' \;
find . -name "*.c" -exec sed -i "s/abcABC_MOVE/MOVE_abcABC/g" '{}' \;
find . -name "*.c" -exec sed -i "s/Abc_MOVE_/MOVE_Abc_/g" '{}' \;
How can I do this string manipulation without writing explicitly the string before first underscore? I think I need a regular expression which looks for this token
_MOVE_ (_MOVE shall be also sufficient, I guess.)
and changes what is before and after first underscore.
Question 2:
If one has an idea how to solve the mentioned problem it would be perfect. Even better (yeah, even better than perfect ;) would be to exclude one specific string (e.g. Abc_) that the result becomes:
h_a1Ha MOVE_Ab1_rest h _4Aihi
bl_aa MOVE_abc123ABC_rest bl_ub
blu_b MOVE_abcABC_rest bla_a
foo _o Abc_MOVE_rest tes _t
Thanks and cheers,
David
I think the above two answers are too fancy, maybe you can try this one, it's simple enough to solve you problem:
sed -r -e 's/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)_(MOVE)/\2_\1/g; s/(MOVE)_(Abc)/\2_\1/g'
Check this command:
sed -r 's/([^_]*)_([^_]*)/1st: \1\n2nd: \2/' <<< 'foo_bar'
it gives you:
1st: foo
2nd: bar
You can match a sequence of non underscores by [^_]*. Using the parentheses () you can capture them individually and access them in the replacement pattern like \1, \2 and so on.
You can try this :
$ sed '/[^ ]* Abc/!{/[^ ]* MOVE/! s/\([^ ]* \)\([^_]*\)_\([^_]*\)_\(.*\)/\1\3_\2_\4/} ' file
haha MOVE_Ab1_rest hihi
blaa MOVE_abc123ABC_rest blub
blub MOVE_abcABC_rest blaa
fooo Abc_MOVE_rest test
It swaps strings surrounding first underscore except when string before first underscore starts with MOVE or Abc.
Maybe a bit more readable if you have Extended Regex support (-r option) :
sed -r '/[^ ]* Abc/!{/[^ ]* MOVE/! s/([^ ]* )([^_]*)_([^_]*)_(.*)/\1\3_\2_\4/}' file
The idea here is to deal with spaces and _ to capture groups. It's a more generic approach than using classes of characters that should be updated with possible omitted characters.

How to swap text based on patterns at once with sed?

Suppose I have 'abbc' string and I want to replace:
ab -> bc
bc -> ab
If I try two replaces the result is not what I want:
echo 'abbc' | sed 's/ab/bc/g;s/bc/ab/g'
abab
So what sed command can I use to replace like below?
echo abbc | sed SED_COMMAND
bcab
EDIT:
Actually the text could have more than 2 patterns and I don't know how many replaces I will need. Since there was a answer saying that sed is a stream editor and its replaces are greedily I think that I will need to use some script language for that.
Maybe something like this:
sed 's/ab/~~/g; s/bc/ab/g; s/~~/bc/g'
Replace ~ with a character that you know won't be in the string.
I always use multiple statements with "-e"
$ sed -e 's:AND:\n&:g' -e 's:GROUP BY:\n&:g' -e 's:UNION:\n&:g' -e 's:FROM:\n&:g' file > readable.sql
This will append a '\n' before all AND's, GROUP BY's, UNION's and FROM's, whereas '&' means the matched string and '\n&' means you want to replace the matched string with an '\n' before the 'matched'
sed is a stream editor. It searches and replaces greedily. The only way to do what you asked for is using an intermediate substitution pattern and changing it back in the end.
echo 'abcd' | sed -e 's/ab/xy/;s/cd/ab/;s/xy/cd/'
Here is a variation on ooga's answer that works for multiple search and replace pairs without having to check how values might be reused:
sed -i '
s/\bAB\b/________BC________/g
s/\bBC\b/________CD________/g
s/________//g
' path_to_your_files/*.txt
Here is an example:
before:
some text AB some more text "BC" and more text.
after:
some text BC some more text "CD" and more text.
Note that \b denotes word boundaries, which is what prevents the ________ from interfering with the search (I'm using GNU sed 4.2.2 on Ubuntu). If you are not using a word boundary search, then this technique may not work.
Also note that this gives the same results as removing the s/________//g and appending && sed -i 's/________//g' path_to_your_files/*.txt to the end of the command, but doesn't require specifying the path twice.
A general variation on this would be to use \x0 or _\x0_ in place of ________ if you know that no nulls appear in your files, as jthill suggested.
Here is an excerpt from the SED manual:
-e script
--expression=script
Add the commands in script to the set of commands to be run while processing the input.
Prepend each substitution with -e option and collect them together. The example that works for me follows:
sed < ../.env-turret.dist \
-e "s/{{ name }}/turret$TURRETS_COUNT_INIT/g" \
-e "s/{{ account }}/$CFW_ACCOUNT_ID/g" > ./.env.dist
This example also shows how to use environment variables in your substitutions.
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed -r '1{x;s/^/:abbc:bcab/;x};G;s/^/\n/;:a;/\n\n/{P;d};s/\n(ab|bc)(.*\n.*:(\1)([^:]*))/\4\n\2/;ta;s/\n(.)/\1\n/;ta' file
This uses a lookup table which is prepared and held in the hold space (HS) and then appended to each line. An unique marker (in this case \n) is prepended to the start of the line and used as a method to bump-along the search throughout the length of the line. Once the marker reaches the end of the line the process is finished and is printed out the lookup table and markers being discarded.
N.B. The lookup table is prepped at the very start and a second unique marker (in this case :) chosen so as not to clash with the substitution strings.
With some comments:
sed -r '
# initialize hold with :abbc:bcab
1 {
x
s/^/:abbc:bcab/
x
}
G # append hold to patt (after a \n)
s/^/\n/ # prepend a \n
:a
/\n\n/ {
P # print patt up to first \n
d # delete patt & start next cycle
}
s/\n(ab|bc)(.*\n.*:(\1)([^:]*))/\4\n\2/
ta # goto a if sub occurred
s/\n(.)/\1\n/ # move one char past the first \n
ta # goto a if sub occurred
'
The table works like this:
** ** replacement
:abbc:bcab
** ** pattern
Tcl has a builtin for this
$ tclsh
% string map {ab bc bc ab} abbc
bcab
This works by walking the string a character at a time doing string comparisons starting at the current position.
In perl:
perl -E '
sub string_map {
my ($str, %map) = #_;
my $i = 0;
while ($i < length $str) {
KEYS:
for my $key (keys %map) {
if (substr($str, $i, length $key) eq $key) {
substr($str, $i, length $key) = $map{$key};
$i += length($map{$key}) - 1;
last KEYS;
}
}
$i++;
}
return $str;
}
say string_map("abbc", "ab"=>"bc", "bc"=>"ab");
'
bcab
May be a simpler approach for single pattern occurrence you can try as below:
echo 'abbc' | sed 's/ab/bc/;s/bc/ab/2'
My output:
~# echo 'abbc' | sed 's/ab/bc/;s/bc/ab/2'
bcab
For multiple occurrences of pattern:
sed 's/\(ab\)\(bc\)/\2\1/g'
Example
~# cat try.txt
abbc abbc abbc
bcab abbc bcab
abbc abbc bcab
~# sed 's/\(ab\)\(bc\)/\2\1/g' try.txt
bcab bcab bcab
bcab bcab bcab
bcab bcab bcab
Hope this helps !!
echo "C:\Users\San.Tan\My Folder\project1" | sed -e 's/C:\\/mnt\/c\//;s/\\/\//g'
replaces
C:\Users\San.Tan\My Folder\project1
to
mnt/c/Users/San.Tan/My Folder/project1
in case someone needs to replace windows paths to Windows Subsystem for Linux(WSL) paths
If replacing the string by Variable, the solution doesn't work.
The sed command need to be in double quotes instead on single quote.
#sed -e "s/#replacevarServiceName#/$varServiceName/g" -e "s/#replacevarImageTag#/$varImageTag/g" deployment.yaml
Here is an awk based on oogas sed
echo 'abbc' | awk '{gsub(/ab/,"xy");gsub(/bc/,"ab");gsub(/xy/,"bc")}1'
bcab
I believe this should solve your problem. I may be missing a few edge cases, please comment if you notice one.
You need a way to exclude previous substitutions from future patterns, which really means making outputs distinguishable, as well as excluding these outputs from your searches, and finally making outputs indistinguishable again. This is very similar to the quoting/escaping process, so I'll draw from it.
s/\\/\\\\/g escapes all existing backslashes
s/ab/\\b\\c/g substitutes raw ab for escaped bc
s/bc/\\a\\b/g substitutes raw bc for escaped ab
s/\\\(.\)/\1/g substitutes all escaped X for raw X
I have not accounted for backslashes in ab or bc, but intuitively, I would escape the search and replace terms the same way - \ now matches \\, and substituted \\ will appear as \.
Until now I have been using backslashes as the escape character, but it's not necessarily the best choice. Almost any character should work, but be careful with the characters that need escaping in your environment, sed, etc. depending on how you intend to use the results.
Every answer posted thus far seems to agree with the statement by kuriouscoder made in his above post:
The only way to do what you asked for is using an intermediate
substitution pattern and changing it back in the end
If you are going to do this, however, and your usage might involve more than some trivial string (maybe you are filtering data, etc.), the best character to use with sed is a newline. This is because since sed is 100% line-based, a newline is the one-and-only character you are guaranteed to never receive when a new line is fetched (forget about GNU multi-line extensions for this discussion).
To start with, here is a very simple approach to solving your problem using newlines as an intermediate delimiter:
echo "abbc" | sed -E $'s/ab|bc/\\\n&/g; s/\\nab/bc/g; s/\\nbc/ab/g'
With simplicity comes some trade-offs... if you had more than a couple variables, like in your original post, you have to type them all twice. Performance might be able to be improved a little bit, too.
It gets pretty nasty to do much beyond this using sed. Even with some of the more advanced features like branching control and the hold buffer (which is really weak IMO), your options are pretty limited.
Just for fun, I came up with this one alternative, but I don't think I would have any particular reason to recommend it over the one from earlier in this post... You have to essentially make your own "convention" for delimiters if you really want to do anything fancy in sed. This is way-overkill for your original post, but it might spark some ideas for people who come across this post and have more complicated situations.
My convention below was: use multiple newlines to "protect" or "unprotect" the part of the line you're working on. One newline denotes a word boundary. Two newlines denote alternatives for a candidate replacement. I don't replace right away, but rather list the candidate replacement on the next line. Three newlines means that a value is "locked-in", like your original post way trying to do with ab and bc. After that point, further replacements will be undone, because they are protected by the newlines. A little complicated if I don't say so myself... ! sed isn't really meant for much more than the basics.
# Newlines
NL=$'\\\n'
NOT_NL=$'[\x01-\x09\x0B-\x7F]'
# Delimiters
PRE="${NL}${NL}&${NL}"
POST="${NL}${NL}"
# Un-doer (if a request was made to modify a locked-in value)
tidy="s/(\\n\\n\\n${NOT_NL}*)\\n\\n(${NOT_NL}*)\\n(${NOT_NL}*)\\n\\n/\\1\\2/g; "
# Locker-inner (three newlines means "do not touch")
tidy+="s/(\\n\\n)${NOT_NL}*\\n(${NOT_NL}*\\n\\n)/\\1${NL}\\2/g;"
# Finalizer (remove newlines)
final="s/\\n//g"
# Input/Commands
input="abbc"
cmd1="s/(ab)/${PRE}bc${POST}/g"
cmd2="s/(bc)/${PRE}ab${POST}/g"
# Execute
echo ${input} | sed -E "${cmd1}; ${tidy}; ${cmd2}; ${tidy}; ${final}"

search and replace substring in string in bash

I have the following task:
I have to replace several links, but only the links which ends with .do
Important: the files have also other links within, but they should stay untouched.
<li>Einstellungen verwalten</li>
to
<li>Einstellungen verwalten</li>
So I have to search for links with .do, take the part before and remember it for example as $a , replace the whole link with
<s:url action=' '/>
and past $a between the quotes.
I thought about sed, but sed as I know does only search a whole string and replace it complete.
I also tried bash Parameter Expansions in combination with sed but got severel problems with the quotes and the variables.
cat ./src/main/webapp/include/stoBox2.jsp | grep -e '<a href=".*\.do">' | while read a;
do
b=${a#*href=\"};
c=${b%.do*};
sed -i 's/href=\"$a.do\"/href=\"<s:url action=\'$a\'/>\"/g' ./src/main/webapp/include/stoBox2.jsp;
done;
any ideas ?
Thanks a lot.
sed -i sed 's#href="\(.*\)\.do"#href="<s:url action='"'\1'"'/>"#g' ./src/main/webapp/include/stoBox2.jsp
Use patterns with parentheses to get the link without .do, and here single and double quotes separate the sed command with 3 parts (but in fact join with one command) to escape the quotes in your text.
's#href="\(.*\)\.do"#href="<s:url action='
"'\1'"
'/>"#g'
parameters -i is used for modify your file derectly. If you don't want to do this just remove it. and save results to a tmp file with > tmp.
Try this one:
sed -i "s%\(href=\"\)\([^\"]\+\)\.do%\1<s:url action='\2'/>%g" \
./src/main/webapp/include/stoBox2.jsp;
You can capture patterns with parenthesis (\(,\)) and use it in the replacement pattern.
Here I catch a string without any " but preceding .do (\([^\"]\+\)\.do), and insert it without the .do suffix (\2).
There is a / in the second pattern, so I used %s to delimit expressions instead of traditional /.

How to retain the first instance of a match with sed

I have a set of tokens in data and wish to strip off the trailing ".[0-9]", however i cannot figure out how to quote the regexp properly. The First match should be all up to the . and the second the . and a number. I am intending that the first match be retained.
data="thing thing__aaa.0 thing__bbb.3 thing__ccc.5 other_aaa other_bbb other_ccc.5"
data=`echo $data | sed s/\([a-zA-Z0-9_]+\)\(\.[0-9]\)/\1/g`
echo $data
Actual output:
thing thing__aaa.0 thing__bbb.3 thing__ccc.5 other_aaa other_bbb other_ccc.5
Desired output:
thing thing__aaa thing__bbb thing__ccc other_aaa other_bbb other_ccc
The idea is that the unquoted ([a-zA-Z0-9_]+) is the first matching group, and the (\.[0-9]) matches the .number. the \1 should replace both groups with the first group.
How about just
echo $data | sed 's/\.[0-9]//g'
or if number may contain more digits, then
echo $data | sed 's/\.[0-9]\+//g'
It looks like you just want to delete all strings of the form \.[0-9]. So why not just do:
sed 's/\.[0-9]+\b//g'
(This relies on gnu sed's \b and + extensions. For other sed you can do:
sed 's/\.[0-9][0-9]*\( \|$\)/\1/g'
I normally don't encourage the use of shell specific extensions, but if you are using bash you might be happy using an array:
bash$ data=(thing thing__aaa.0 thing__bbb.3)
bash$ echo "${data[#]%.[0-9]*}"
Note that this will also delete extensions that are not all digits (ie foo.34bb), but perhaps is adequate for your needs.)

Monster perl regex

I'm trying to change strings like this:
<a href='../Example/case23.html'><img src='Blablabla.jpg'
To this:
<a href='../Example/case23.html'><img src='<?php imgname('case23'); ?>'
And I've got this monster of a regular expression:
find . -type f | xargs perl -pi -e \
's/<a href=\'(.\.\.\/Example\/)(case\d\d)(.\.html\'><img src=\')*\'/\1\2\3<\?php imgname\(\'\2\'); \?>\'/'
But it isn't working. In fact, I think it's a problem with Bash, which could probably be pointed out rather quickly.
r: line 4: syntax error near unexpected token `('
r: line 4: ` 's/<a href=\'(.\.\.\/Example\/)(case\d\d)(.\.html\'><img src=\')*\'/\1\2\3<\?php imgname\(\'\2\'); \?>\'/''
But if you want to help me with the regular expression that'd be cool, too!
Teaching you how to fish:
s/…/…/
Use a separator other than / for the s operator because / already occurs in the expression.
s{…}{…}
Cut down on backslash quoting, prefer [.] over \. because we'll shellquote later. Let's keep backslashes only for the necessary or important parts, namely here the digits character class.
s{<a href='[.][.]/Example/case(\d\d)[.]html'>…
Capture only the variable part. No need to reassemble the string later if the most part is static.
s{<a href='[.][.]/Example/case(\d\d)[.]html'><img src='[^']*'}{<a href='../Example/case$1.html'><img src='<?php imgname('case$1'); ?>'}
Use $1 instead of \1 to denote backreferences. [^']* means everything until the next '.
To serve now as the argument for the Perl -e option, this program needs to be shellquoted. Employ the following helper program, you can also use an alias or shell function instead:
> cat `which shellquote`
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use String::ShellQuote qw(shell_quote); undef $/; print shell_quote <>
Run it and paste the program body, terminate input with Ctrl+d, you receive:
's{<a href='\''[.][.]/Example/case(\d\d)[.]html'\''><img src='\''[^'\'']*'\''}{<a href='\''../Example/case$1.html'\''><img src='\''<?php imgname('\''case$1'\''); ?>'\''}'
Put this together with shell pipeline.
find . -type f | xargs perl -pi -e 's{<a href='\''[.][.]/Example/case(\d\d)[.]html'\''><img src='\''[^'\'']*'\''}{<a href='\''../Example/case$1.html'\''><img src='\''<?php imgname('\''case$1'\''); ?>'\''}'
Bash single-quotes do not permit any escapes.
Try this at a bash prompt and you'll see what I mean:
FOO='\'foo'
will cause it to prompt you looking for the fourth single-quote. If you satisfy it, you'll find FOO's value is
\foo
You'll need to use double-quotes around your expression. Although in truth, your HTML should be using double-quotes in the first place.
Single quotes within single quotes in Bash:
set -xv
echo ''"'"''
echo $'\''
I wouldn't use a one-liner. Put your Perl code in a script, which makes it much easier to get the regex right without wondering about escaping quotes and such.
I'd use a script like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl -pi
use strict;
use warnings;
s{
( <a \b [^>]* \b href=['"] [^'"]*/case(\d+)\.html ['"] [^>]* > \s*
<img \b [^>]* \b src=['"] ) [^'"<] [^'"]*
}{$1<?php imgname('case$2'); ?>}gix;
and then do something like:
find . -type f | xargs fiximgs
– Michael
if you install the package mysql, it comes with a command called replace.
With the replace command you can:
while read line
do
X=`echo $line| replace "<a href='../Example/" ""|replace ".html'><" " "|awk '{print $1}'`
echo "<a href='../Example/$X.html'><img src='<?php imgname('$X'); ?>'">NewFile
done < myfile
same can be done with sed. sed s/'my string'/'replace string'/g.. replace is just easier to work with special characters.