Dynamic delimiter in Unix - shell

Input:-
echo "1234ABC89,234" # A
echo "0520001DEF78,66" # B
echo "46545455KRJ21,00"
From the above strings, I need to split the characters to get the alphabetic field and the number after that.
From "1234ABC89,234", the output should be:
ABC
89,234
From "0520001DEF78,66", the output should be:
DEF
78,66
I have many strings that I need to split like this.
Here is my script so far:
echo "1234ABC89,234" | cut -d',' -f1
but it gives me 1234ABC89 which isn't what I want.

Assuming that you want to discard leading digits only, and that the letters will be all upper case, the following should work:
echo "1234ABC89,234" | sed 's/^[0-9]*\([A-Z]*\)\([0-9].*\)/\1\n\2/'
This works fine with GNU sed (I have 4.2.2), but other sed implementations might not like the \n, in which case you'll need to substitute something else.

Depending on the version of sed you can try:
echo "0520001DEF78,66" | sed -E -e 's/[0-9]*([A-Z]*)([,0-9]*)/\1\n\2/'
or:
echo "0520001DEF78,66" | sed -E -e 's/[0-9]*([A-Z]*)([,0-9]*)/\1$\2/' | tr '$' '\n'
DEF
78,66
Explanation: the regular expression replaces the input with the expected output, except instead of the new-line it puts a "$" sign, that we replace to a new-line with the tr command

Where do the strings come from? Are they read from a file (or other source external to the script), or are they stored in the script? If they're in the script, you should simply reformat the data so it is easier to manage. Therefore, it is sensible to assume they come from an external data source such as a file or being piped to the script.
You could simply feed the data through sed:
sed 's/^[0-9]*\([A-Z]*\)/\1 /' |
while read alpha number
do
…process the two fields…
done
The only trick to watch there is that if you set variables in the loop, they won't necessarily be visible to the script after the done. There are ways around that problem — some of which depend on which shell you use. This much is the same in any derivative of the Bourne shell.

You said you have many strings like this, so I recommend if possible save them to a file such as input.txt:
1234ABC89,234
0520001DEF78,66
46545455KRJ21,00
On your command line, try this sed command reading input.txt as file argument:
$ sed -E 's/([0-9]+)([[:alpha:]]{3})(.+)/\2\t\3/g' input.txt
ABC 89,234
DEF 78,66
KRJ 21,00
How it works
uses -E for extended regular expressions to save on typing, otherwise for example for grouping we would have to escape \(
uses grouping ( and ), searches three groups:
firstly digits, + specifies one-or-more of digits. Oddly using [0-9] results in an extra blank space above results, so use POSIX class [[:digit:]]
the next is to search for POSIX alphabetical characters, regardless if lowercase or uppercase, and {3} specifies to search for 3 of them
the last group searches for . meaning any character, + for one or more times
\2\t\3 then returns group 2 and group 3, with a tab separator
Thus you are able to extract two separate fields per line, just separated by tab, for easier manipulation later.

Related

Replacing contents in a file via bashrc script and writing to directory [duplicate]

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}"

Bash script output text between first match and 2nd match only [duplicate]

I'm trying to use sed to clean up lines of URLs to extract just the domain.
So from:
http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/
I want:
http://www.suepearson.co.uk/
(either with or without the trailing slash, it doesn't matter)
I have tried:
sed 's|\(http:\/\/.*?\/\).*|\1|'
and (escaping the non-greedy quantifier)
sed 's|\(http:\/\/.*\?\/\).*|\1|'
but I can not seem to get the non-greedy quantifier (?) to work, so it always ends up matching the whole string.
Neither basic nor extended Posix/GNU regex recognizes the non-greedy quantifier; you need a later regex. Fortunately, Perl regex for this context is pretty easy to get:
perl -pe 's|(http://.*?/).*|\1|'
In this specific case, you can get the job done without using a non-greedy regex.
Try this non-greedy regex [^/]* instead of .*?:
sed 's|\(http://[^/]*/\).*|\1|g'
With sed, I usually implement non-greedy search by searching for anything except the separator until the separator :
echo "http://www.suon.co.uk/product/1/7/3/" | sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*\)/.*;\1;p'
Output:
http://www.suon.co.uk
this is:
don't output -n
search, match pattern, replace and print s/<pattern>/<replace>/p
use ; search command separator instead of / to make it easier to type so s;<pattern>;<replace>;p
remember match between brackets \( ... \), later accessible with \1,\2...
match http://
followed by anything in brackets [], [ab/] would mean either a or b or /
first ^ in [] means not, so followed by anything but the thing in the []
so [^/] means anything except / character
* is to repeat previous group so [^/]* means characters except /.
so far sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*\) means search and remember http://followed by any characters except / and remember what you've found
we want to search untill the end of domain so stop on the next / so add another / at the end: sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*\)/' but we want to match the rest of the line after the domain so add .*
now the match remembered in group 1 (\1) is the domain so replace matched line with stuff saved in group \1 and print: sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*\)/.*;\1;p'
If you want to include backslash after the domain as well, then add one more backslash in the group to remember:
echo "http://www.suon.co.uk/product/1/7/3/" | sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*/\).*;\1;p'
output:
http://www.suon.co.uk/
Simulating lazy (un-greedy) quantifier in sed
And all other regex flavors!
Finding first occurrence of an expression:
POSIX ERE (using -r option)
Regex:
(EXPRESSION).*|.
Sed:
sed -r ‍'s/(EXPRESSION).*|./\1/g' # Global `g` modifier should be on
Example (finding first sequence of digits) Live demo:
$ sed -r 's/([0-9]+).*|./\1/g' <<< 'foo 12 bar 34'
12
How does it work?
This regex benefits from an alternation |. At each position engine tries to pick the longest match (this is a POSIX standard which is followed by couple of other engines as well) which means it goes with . until a match is found for ([0-9]+).*. But order is important too.
Since global flag is set, engine tries to continue matching character by character up to the end of input string or our target. As soon as the first and only capturing group of left side of alternation is matched (EXPRESSION) rest of line is consumed immediately as well .*. We now hold our value in the first capturing group.
POSIX BRE
Regex:
\(\(\(EXPRESSION\).*\)*.\)*
Sed:
sed 's/\(\(\(EXPRESSION\).*\)*.\)*/\3/'
Example (finding first sequence of digits):
$ sed 's/\(\(\([0-9]\{1,\}\).*\)*.\)*/\3/' <<< 'foo 12 bar 34'
12
This one is like ERE version but with no alternation involved. That's all. At each single position engine tries to match a digit.
If it is found, other following digits are consumed and captured and the rest of line is matched immediately otherwise since * means
more or zero it skips over second capturing group \(\([0-9]\{1,\}\).*\)* and arrives at a dot . to match a single character and this process continues.
Finding first occurrence of a delimited expression:
This approach will match the very first occurrence of a string that is delimited. We can call it a block of string.
sed 's/\(END-DELIMITER-EXPRESSION\).*/\1/; \
s/\(\(START-DELIMITER-EXPRESSION.*\)*.\)*/\1/g'
Input string:
foobar start block #1 end barfoo start block #2 end
-EDE: end
-SDE: start
$ sed 's/\(end\).*/\1/; s/\(\(start.*\)*.\)*/\1/g'
Output:
start block #1 end
First regex \(end\).* matches and captures first end delimiter end and substitues all match with recent captured characters which
is the end delimiter. At this stage our output is: foobar start block #1 end.
Then the result is passed to second regex \(\(start.*\)*.\)* that is same as POSIX BRE version above. It matches a single character
if start delimiter start is not matched otherwise it matches and captures the start delimiter and matches the rest of characters.
Directly answering your question
Using approach #2 (delimited expression) you should select two appropriate expressions:
EDE: [^:/]\/
SDE: http:
Usage:
$ sed 's/\([^:/]\/\).*/\1/g; s/\(\(http:.*\)*.\)*/\1/' <<< 'http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/'
Output:
http://www.suepearson.co.uk/
Note: this will not work with identical delimiters.
sed does not support "non greedy" operator.
You have to use "[]" operator to exclude "/" from match.
sed 's,\(http://[^/]*\)/.*,\1,'
P.S. there is no need to backslash "/".
sed - non greedy matching by Christoph Sieghart
The trick to get non greedy matching in sed is to match all characters excluding the one that terminates the match. I know, a no-brainer, but I wasted precious minutes on it and shell scripts should be, after all, quick and easy. So in case somebody else might need it:
Greedy matching
% echo "<b>foo</b>bar" | sed 's/<.*>//g'
bar
Non greedy matching
% echo "<b>foo</b>bar" | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g'
foobar
Non-greedy solution for more than a single character
This thread is really old but I assume people still needs it.
Lets say you want to kill everything till the very first occurrence of HELLO. You cannot say [^HELLO]...
So a nice solution involves two steps, assuming that you can spare a unique word that you are not expecting in the input, say top_sekrit.
In this case we can:
s/HELLO/top_sekrit/ #will only replace the very first occurrence
s/.*top_sekrit// #kill everything till end of the first HELLO
Of course, with a simpler input you could use a smaller word, or maybe even a single character.
HTH!
This can be done using cut:
echo "http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/" | cut -d'/' -f1-3
another way, not using regex, is to use fields/delimiter method eg
string="http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/"
echo $string | awk -F"/" '{print $1,$2,$3}' OFS="/"
sed certainly has its place but this not not one of them !
As Dee has pointed out: Just use cut. It is far simpler and much more safe in this case. Here's an example where we extract various components from the URL using Bash syntax:
url="http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/"
protocol=$(echo "$url" | cut -d':' -f1)
host=$(echo "$url" | cut -d'/' -f3)
urlhost=$(echo "$url" | cut -d'/' -f1-3)
urlpath=$(echo "$url" | cut -d'/' -f4-)
gives you:
protocol = "http"
host = "www.suepearson.co.uk"
urlhost = "http://www.suepearson.co.uk"
urlpath = "product/174/71/3816/"
As you can see this is a lot more flexible approach.
(all credit to Dee)
sed 's|(http:\/\/[^\/]+\/).*|\1|'
There is still hope to solve this using pure (GNU) sed. Despite this is not a generic solution in some cases you can use "loops" to eliminate all the unnecessary parts of the string like this:
sed -r -e ":loop" -e 's|(http://.+)/.*|\1|' -e "t loop"
-r: Use extended regex (for + and unescaped parenthesis)
":loop": Define a new label named "loop"
-e: add commands to sed
"t loop": Jump back to label "loop" if there was a successful substitution
The only problem here is it will also cut the last separator character ('/'), but if you really need it you can still simply put it back after the "loop" finished, just append this additional command at the end of the previous command line:
-e "s,$,/,"
sed -E interprets regular expressions as extended (modern) regular expressions
Update: -E on MacOS X, -r in GNU sed.
Because you specifically stated you're trying to use sed (instead of perl, cut, etc.), try grouping. This circumvents the non-greedy identifier potentially not being recognized. The first group is the protocol (i.e. 'http://', 'https://', 'tcp://', etc). The second group is the domain:
echo "http://www.suon.co.uk/product/1/7/3/" | sed "s|^\(.*//\)\([^/]*\).*$|\1\2|"
If you're not familiar with grouping, start here.
I realize this is an old entry, but someone may find it useful.
As the full domain name may not exceed a total length of 253 characters replace .* with .\{1, 255\}
This is how to robustly do non-greedy matching of multi-character strings using sed. Lets say you want to change every foo...bar to <foo...bar> so for example this input:
$ cat file
ABC foo DEF bar GHI foo KLM bar NOP foo QRS bar TUV
should become this output:
ABC <foo DEF bar> GHI <foo KLM bar> NOP <foo QRS bar> TUV
To do that you convert foo and bar to individual characters and then use the negation of those characters between them:
$ sed 's/#/#A/g; s/{/#B/g; s/}/#C/g; s/foo/{/g; s/bar/}/g; s/{[^{}]*}/<&>/g; s/}/bar/g; s/{/foo/g; s/#C/}/g; s/#B/{/g; s/#A/#/g' file
ABC <foo DEF bar> GHI <foo KLM bar> NOP <foo QRS bar> TUV
In the above:
s/#/#A/g; s/{/#B/g; s/}/#C/g is converting { and } to placeholder strings that cannot exist in the input so those chars then are available to convert foo and bar to.
s/foo/{/g; s/bar/}/g is converting foo and bar to { and } respectively
s/{[^{}]*}/<&>/g is performing the op we want - converting foo...bar to <foo...bar>
s/}/bar/g; s/{/foo/g is converting { and } back to foo and bar.
s/#C/}/g; s/#B/{/g; s/#A/#/g is converting the placeholder strings back to their original characters.
Note that the above does not rely on any particular string not being present in the input as it manufactures such strings in the first step, nor does it care which occurrence of any particular regexp you want to match since you can use {[^{}]*} as many times as necessary in the expression to isolate the actual match you want and/or with seds numeric match operator, e.g. to only replace the 2nd occurrence:
$ sed 's/#/#A/g; s/{/#B/g; s/}/#C/g; s/foo/{/g; s/bar/}/g; s/{[^{}]*}/<&>/2; s/}/bar/g; s/{/foo/g; s/#C/}/g; s/#B/{/g; s/#A/#/g' file
ABC foo DEF bar GHI <foo KLM bar> NOP foo QRS bar TUV
Have not yet seen this answer, so here's how you can do this with vi or vim:
vi -c '%s/\(http:\/\/.\{-}\/\).*/\1/ge | wq' file &>/dev/null
This runs the vi :%s substitution globally (the trailing g), refrains from raising an error if the pattern is not found (e), then saves the resulting changes to disk and quits. The &>/dev/null prevents the GUI from briefly flashing on screen, which can be annoying.
I like using vi sometimes for super complicated regexes, because (1) perl is dead dying, (2) vim has a very advanced regex engine, and (3) I'm already intimately familiar with vi regexes in my day-to-day usage editing documents.
Since PCRE is also tagged here, we could use GNU grep by using non-lazy match in regex .*? which will match first nearest match opposite of .*(which is really greedy and goes till last occurrence of match).
grep -oP '^http[s]?:\/\/.*?/' Input_file
Explanation: using grep's oP options here where -P is responsible for enabling PCRE regex here. In main program of grep mentioning regex which is matching starting http/https followed by :// till next occurrence of / since we have used .*? it will look for first / after (http/https://). It will print matched part only in line.
echo "/home/one/two/three/myfile.txt" | sed 's|\(.*\)/.*|\1|'
don bother, i got it on another forum :)
sed 's|\(http:\/\/www\.[a-z.0-9]*\/\).*|\1| works too
Here is something you can do with a two step approach and awk:
A=http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/
echo $A|awk '
{
var=gensub(///,"||",3,$0) ;
sub(/\|\|.*/,"",var);
print var
}'
Output:
http://www.suepearson.co.uk
Hope that helps!
Another sed version:
sed 's|/[:alnum:].*||' file.txt
It matches / followed by an alphanumeric character (so not another forward slash) as well as the rest of characters till the end of the line. Afterwards it replaces it with nothing (ie. deletes it.)
#Daniel H (concerning your comment on andcoz' answer, although long time ago): deleting trailing zeros works with
s,([[:digit:]]\.[[:digit:]]*[1-9])[0]*$,\1,g
it's about clearly defining the matching conditions ...
You should also think about the case where there is no matching delims. Do you want to output the line or not. My examples here do not output anything if there is no match.
You need prefix up to 3rd /, so select two times string of any length not containing / and following / and then string of any length not containing / and then match / following any string and then print selection. This idea works with any single char delims.
echo http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/ | \
sed -nr 's,(([^/]*/){2}[^/]*)/.*,\1,p'
Using sed commands you can do fast prefix dropping or delim selection, like:
echo 'aaa #cee: { "foo":" #cee: " }' | \
sed -r 't x;s/ #cee: /\n/;D;:x'
This is lot faster than eating char at a time.
Jump to label if successful match previously. Add \n at / before 1st delim. Remove up to first \n. If \n was added, jump to end and print.
If there is start and end delims, it is just easy to remove end delims until you reach the nth-2 element you want and then do D trick, remove after end delim, jump to delete if no match, remove before start delim and and print. This only works if start/end delims occur in pairs.
echo 'foobar start block #1 end barfoo start block #2 end bazfoo start block #3 end goo start block #4 end faa' | \
sed -r 't x;s/end//;s/end/\n/;D;:x;s/(end).*/\1/;T y;s/.*(start)/\1/;p;:y;d'
If you have access to gnu grep, then can utilize perl regex:
grep -Po '^https?://([^/]+)(?=)' <<< 'http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/'
http://www.suepearson.co.uk
Alternatively, to get everything after the domain use
grep -Po '^https?://([^/]+)\K.*' <<< 'http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/'
/product/174/71/3816/
The following solution works for matching / working with multiply present (chained; tandem; compound) HTML or other tags. For example, I wanted to edit HTML code to remove <span> tags, that appeared in tandem.
Issue: regular sed regex expressions greedily matched over all the tags from the first to the last.
Solution: non-greedy pattern matching (per discussions elsewhere in this thread; e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/a/46719361/1904943).
Example:
echo '<span>Will</span>This <span>remove</span>will <span>this.</span>remain.' | \
sed 's/<span>[^>]*>//g' ; echo
This will remain.
Explanation:
s/<span> : find <span>
[^>] : followed by anything that is not >
*> : until you find >
//g : replace any such strings present with nothing.
Addendum
I was trying to clean up URLs, but I was running into difficulty matching / excluding a word - href - using the approach above. I briefly looked at negative lookarounds (Regular expression to match a line that doesn't contain a word) but that approach seemed overly complex and did not provide a satisfactory solution.
I decided to replace href with ` (backtick), do the regex substitutions, then replace ` with href.
Example (formatted here for readability):
printf '\n
<a aaa h href="apple">apple</a>
<a bbb "c=ccc" href="banana">banana</a>
<a class="gtm-content-click"
data-vars-link-text="nope"
data-vars-click-url="https://blablabla"
data-vars-event-category="story"
data-vars-sub-category="story"
data-vars-item="in_content_link"
data-vars-link-text
href="https:example.com">Example.com</a>\n\n' |
sed 's/href/`/g ;
s/<a[^`]*`/\n<a href/g'
apple
banana
Example.com
Explanation: basically as above. Here,
s/href/` : replace href with ` (backtick)
s/<a : find start of URL
[^`] : followed by anything that is not ` (backtick)
*` : until you find a `
/<a href/g : replace each of those found with <a href
Unfortunately, as mentioned, this it is not supported in sed.
To overcome this, I suggest to use the next best thing(actually better even), to use vim sed-like capabilities.
define in .bash-profile
vimdo() { vim $2 --not-a-term -c "$1" -es +"w >> /dev/stdout" -cq! ; }
That will create headless vim to execute a command.
Now you can do for example:
echo $PATH | vimdo "%s_\c:[a-zA-Z0-9\\/]\{-}python[a-zA-Z0-9\\/]\{-}:__g" -
to filter out python in $PATH.
Use - to have input from pipe in vimdo.
While most of the syntax is the same. Vim features more advanced features, and using \{-} is standard for non-greedy match. see help regexp.

Using BASH, how to increment a number that uniquely only occurs once in most lines of an HTML file?

The target is always going to be between two characters, 'E' and '/' and there will never be but one occurrence of this combination, e.g. 'E01/' in most lines in the HTML file and will always be between '01' and '90'.
So, I need to programmatically read the file and replace each occurrence of 'Enn/' where 'nn' in 'Enn/' will be between '01' and '90' and must maintain the '0' for numbers '01' to '09' in 'Enn/' while incrementing the existing number by 1 throughout the HTML file.
Is this doable and if so how best to go about it?
Edit: Target lines will be in one or the other formats:
<DT>ProgramName
<DT>Program Name
You can use sed inside BASH as a fantastic one-liner, either:
sed -ri 's/(.*E)([0-9]{2})(\/.*)/printf "\1%02u\3" $((10#\2+(10#\2>=90?0:1)))/ge' FILENAME
or if you are guaranteed the number is lower than 100:
sed -ri 's/(.*E)([0-9]{2})(\/.*)/printf "\1%02u\3" $((10#\2+1)))/ge' FILENAME
Basically, you'll be doing inplace search and replace. The above will not add anything after 90 (since you didn't specify the exact nature of the overflow condition). So E89/ -> E90/, E90/ -> E90/, and if by chance you have E91/, it will remain E91/. Add this line inside a loop for multiple files
A small explanation of the above command:
-r states that you'll be using a regular expression
-i states to write back to the same file (be careful with overwriting!)
s/search/replace/ge this is the regex command you'll be using
s/ states you'll be using a string search
(.E) first grouping of all characters upto the first E (case sensitive)
([0-9]{2}) second grouping of numbers 0 through 9, repeated twice (fixed width)
(/.) third grouping getting the escaped trailing slash and everything after that
/ (slash separator) denotes end of search pattern and beginning of replacement pattern
printf "format" var this is the expression used for each replacement
\1 place first grouping found here
%02u the replace format for the var
\3 place third grouping found here
$((expression)) BASH arithmetic expression to use in printf format
10#\2 force second grouping as a base 10 number
+(10#\2>=90?0:1) add 0 or 1 to the second grouping based on if it is >= 90 (as used in first command)
+1 add 1 to the second grouping (see second command)
/ge flags for global replacement and the replace parameter will be an expression
GNU sed and awk are very powerful tools to do this sort of thing.
You can use the following perl one-liner to increment the numbers while maintaining the ones with leading 0s.
perl -pe 's/E\K([0-9]+)/sprintf "%02d", 1+$1/e' file
$ cat file
<DT>ProgramName
<DT>Program Name
<DT>Program Name
<DT>Program Name
$ perl -pe 's/E\K([0-9]+)/sprintf "%02d", 1+$1/e' file
<DT>ProgramName
<DT>Program Name
<DT>Program Name
<DT>Program Name
You can add the -i option to make changes in-place. I would recommend creating backup before doing so.
Not as elegant as one line sed!
Break the commands used into multiple commands and you can debug your bash or grep or sed.
# find the number
# use -o to grep to just return pattern
# use head -n1 for safety to just get 1 number
n=$(grep -o "E[0-9][0-9]\/" file.html |grep -o "[0-9][0-9]"|head -n1)
#octal 08 and 09 are problem so need to do this
n1=10#$n
echo Debug n1=$n1 n=$n
n2=n1
# bash arithmetic done inside (( ))
# as ever with bash bracketing whitespace is needed
(( n2++ ))
echo debug n2=$n2
# use sed with -i -e for inline edit to replace number
sed -ie "s/E$n\//E$(printf '%02d' $n2)\//" file.html
grep "E[0-9][0-9]" file.html
awk might be better. Maybe could do it in one awk command also.
The sed one-liner in other answer is awesome :-)
This works in bash or sh.
http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?grep

Using sed/awk to process a pattern in bash

I have a command whose output is of the form:
[{"foo1":<some value>,"foo2":<some value>,"foo3":<some value>}]
I want to take the output of this command and just get the value corresponding to foo2
How do I use sed/awk or any other shell utility readily available in a bash script to do this?
Assuming that the values do not contain commas, this sed rune will do it:
sed -n 's/.*"foo2":\([^,]*\),.*/\1/'p
sed -n tells sed not to print lines by default.
The s ("substitute") command uses a regexp group delimited by \( and \) to pick out just the bit you want.
"foo2": provides the context needed to find the right value.
[^,]* means "a character that is not a comma, any number of times". This is your . If values are not delimited by commas, change this (and the comma after the grouping parens) to match correctly.
.* means "any character, any number of times", and it is used to match all the characters before and after the bit you want. Now the regexp will match the entire line.
\1 means the contents of the grouping parentheses. sed will substitute the string that matches the pattern (which is the whole line, because we used .* at the beginning and end) with the contents of the parens, .
Finally, the p on the end means "print the resulting line".
With this awk for example:
$ awk -F[:,] '{print $4}' file
<some value2>
-F[:,] sets possible field separators as : or ,. Then, it is a matter of counting the position in which <some value> of foo2 are. It happens to be the 4th.
With sed:
$ sed 's/.*"foo2":\([^,]*\).*/\1/g' file
<some value2>
.*"foo2":\([^,]*\).* gets the string coming after foo2: and until the comma appears. Then it prints it back with \1.
Your block of data looks like JSON. There is no native JSON parsing in bash, sed or awk, so ALL the answers here will either suggest that you use a different, more appropriate tool, or they will be hackish and might easily fail if your real data looks different from the example you've provided here.
That said, if you are confident that your variable:value blocks and line structure are always in the same format as this example, you may be able to get away with writing your own (very) basic parser that will work for just your use case.
Note that you can't really parse things in sed, it's just not designed for that. If your data always looks the same, a sed solution may be sufficient ... but remember that you are simply pattern matching, not parsing the input data. There are other answers already which cover this.
For very simple matching of the string that appears after the colon after "foo2", as Peter suggested, you could use the following:
$ data='[{"foo1":11,"foo2":222,"foo3":3333}]'
$ echo "$data" | sed -ne 's/.*"foo2":\([^,]*\),.*/\1/p'
As I say, this should in no way be confused with parsing of your JSON. It would work equally well (or badly) with an input string of abcde"foo2":bar,abcde.
In awk, you can make things that are a bit more advanced, but you still have serious limitations when it comes to JSON. For example, if you choose to separate fields with commas, but then you put a comma inside the <some value> in your data, awk doesn't know how to distinguish it from a field separator.
That said, if your JSON is only one level deep (i.e. matches your sample data), the following might work for you:
$ data='[{"foo1":11,"foo2":222,"foo3":3333}]'
$ echo "$data" | awk -F: -vRS=, '{gsub(/[^[:alnum:]]/,"",$1)} $1=="foo2" {print $2}'
This awk script considers commas as record separators and colons as field separators. It does not support any level of depth in your JSON, and depends on alphanumeric variable names. But it should handle JSON split on to multiple lines.
Alternately, if you want to avoid ugly hacks, and perl or python solutions don't work for you, you might want to try out jsawk. With it, you might use something like this:
$ data='[{"foo1":11,"foo2":222,"foo3":3333}]'
$ echo "$data" | jsawk -a 'return this.foo2'
[222]
SEE ALSO: Parsing json with awk/sed in bash to get key value pair
This worked for me. You can Try this one
echo "[{"foo1":<some value>,"foo2":<some value>,"foo3":<some value>}]" | awk -F"[:,]+" '{ if($3=="foo2") { print $4 }}'
Above line awk uses multiple field separators.I have used colon and comma here
Since this looks like JSON, let's parse it like JSON:
perl -MJSON -ne '$json = decode_json($_); print $json->[0]{foo2}, "\n"' <<END
[{"foo1":"some value","foo2":"some, value","foo3":"some value"}]
END
some, value

How to use sed to test and then edit one line of input?

I want to test whether a phone number is valid, and then translate it to a different format using a script. This far I can test the number like this:
sed -n -e '/(0..)-...\s..../p' -e '/(0..)-...-..../p'
However, I don't just want to test the number and output it, I would like to remove the brackets, dashes and spaces and output that.
Is there any way to do that using sed? Or should I be using something else, like AWK?
I'm not sure why you're using a 0 in that position. You're saying "a zero followed by any two characters" in the area code position. Is that really what you mean?
Anyway, you want to use the sed substitution operator with the p command in conjunction with the -n switch. Here's one way to do it:
sed -n 's/(\([0-9][0-9][0-9]\))\s\?\([0-9][0-9][0-9]\)[- ]\([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]\)/\1\2\3/p'
You can also use something as simple as egrep to validate lines and tr to remove the characters you don't want to see:
egrep "\([0-9]+\)[0-9.-]+" <file> |tr -d '()\-'
Note that it will only work if you don't want to keep any of those characters.
This is a more succinct version of Jonathan Feinberg's answer. It uses extended regular expressions to avoid having to do all the escaping that the curly braces would require (in addition to moving the escaping of parentheses from the special ones to the literal ones).
sed -r 's/\(([[:digit:]]{3})\)\s?([[:digit:]]{3})[ -]([[:digit:]]{4})/\1\2\3/'
this suggestion depends on how your number format looks like , for example, i assume phone number like this
echo "(703) 234 5678" | awk '
{
for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){
gsub(/\(|\)/,"",$i) # remove ( and )
if ($i+0>=0 ){ # check if it more than 0 and a number
print $i
}
if (){
# some other checks
}
}
}
'
do it systematically, and you don't have to waste time crafting out complex regex

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