search and replace multiple occurrences - bash

Question

So I have a file containing millions of lines.
and now within the file I have occurrences such as
=Continent
=Country
=State
=City
=Street
Now I have an excel file in which I have the text that should replace these occurrences - as an example :
=Continent should be replaced with =Asia
Similarly for other text
Now I was thinking of writing a java program to read my input file , read the mapping file and for each occurrence search and replace.
I am being lazy here - was wondering if I could do the same using editors like VIM ?
would that be possible ?
NOTE - I dont want to do a single text replace - I have multiple text that need to be found and replaced and I dont want to do the search and replace manually for each.
EDIT1:
Contents of my file that I want to replace: "1.txt"
continent=cont_text
country=country_text
The file that contains the values I want to replace with : "to_replace.txt"
=cont_text~Asia
=country_text~India
and finally using 'sed' here is my .sh file - but I am doing something wrong - it does not replace the contents of "1.txt"
while IFS="~" read foo bar;
do
echo $foo
echo $bar
for filename in 1.txt; do
sed -i.backup 's/$foo/$bar/g;' $filename
done
done < to_replace.txt

Answer 1

You can't put $foo and $bar in single quotes because the shell won't expand them. You don't need the for $filename in 1.txt loop because sed will loop through the lines of 1.txt. And you can't use -i.backup inside the loop because it will change the backup file each time and not preserve the original. So your script should be:
#!/bin/bash
cp 1.txt 1.txt.backup
while IFS="~" read foo bar;
do
echo $foo
echo $bar
sed -i "s/$foo/=$bar/g;" 1.txt
done < to_replace.txt
Output:
$ cat 1.txt
continent=Asia
country=India

Answer 2

sed is for simple substitutions on individual lines and shell is an environment from which to call tools not a tool to manipulate text so any time you write a shell loop to manipulate text you are doing it wrong.
Just use the tool that the same guys who invented sed and shell also invented to do general text processing jobs like this, awk:
$ awk -F'[=~]' -v OFS="=" 'NR==FNR{map[$2]=$3;next} {$2=map[$2]} 1' to_replace.txt 1.txt
continent=Asia
country=India

Answer 3

This sed command will do it without any loop:
sed -n 's#\(^=[^~]*\)~\(.*\)#s/\1/=\2/g#p' to_replace.txt |sed -i -f- 1.txt
Or sed with extended regex:
sed -nr 's#(^=[^~]*)~(.*)#s/\1/=\2/g#p' to_replace.txt | sed -i -f- 1.txt
Explanation:
The sed command:
sed -n 's#\(^=[^~]*\)~\(.*\)#s/\1/=\2/g#p' to_replace.txt
generates an output:
s/=cont_text/=Asia/g
s/=country_text/=India/g
which is then used as a sed script for the next sed after the pipe.
$ cat 1.txt
continent=Asia
country=India