Replace a block of text - regex

Question

I have a file in this pattern:
Some text
---
## [Unreleased]
More text here
I need to replace the text between '---' and '## [Unreleased]' with something else in a shell script.
How can it be achieved using sed or awk?

Answer 1

Perl to the rescue!
perl -lne 'my #replacement = ("First line", "Second line");
if ($p = (/^---$/ .. /^## \[Unreleased\]/)) {
print $replacement[$p-1];
} else { print }'
The flip-flop operator .. tells you whether you're between the two strings, moreover, it returns the line number relative to the range.

Answer 2

This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed '/^---/,/^## \[Unreleased\]/c\something else' file
Change the lines between two regexp to the required string.

Answer 3

This example may help you.
$ cat f
Some text
---
## [Unreleased]
More text here
$ seq 1 5 >mydata.txt
$ cat mydata.txt
1
2
3
4
5
$ awk '/^---/{f=1; while(getline < c)print;close(c);next}/^## \[Unreleased\]/{f=0;next}!f' c="mydata.txt" f
Some text
1
2
3
4
5
More text here

Answer 4

awk -v RS="\0" 'gsub(/---\n\n## \[Unreleased\]\n/,"something")+1' file
give this line a try.

Answer 5

An awk solution that:
is portable (POSIX-compliant).
can deal with any number of lines between the start line and the end line of the block, and potentially with multiple blocks (although they'd all be replaced with the same text).
reads the file line by line (as opposed to reading the entire file at once).
awk -v new='something else' '
/^---$/ { f=1; next } # Block start: set flag, skip line
f && /^## \[Unreleased\]$/ { f=0; print new; next } # Block end: unset flag, print new txt
! f # Print line, if before or after block
' file