How to insert strings containing slashes with sed

Question

I have a Visual Studio project  which is developed locally  Code files have to be deployed to a remote server  The only problem are the URLs they contain  which are hard-coded  The project contains URLS such as  page one  For the link to be valid on the server  it must be  page one   I ve decided to replace all URLS in my code files with sed before deployment  but I m stuck on slashes  I know this is a not a pretty solution  but it s simple and would save me a lot of time  The total number of strings I have to replace is fewer than 10  Total number of files which have to be checked is  30  Example describing my situation is below  Command I m using  sed -f replace txt  lt  a txt  gt  b txt  replace txt which contains all the strings  s  page one amp  pageone g s  page two amp  pagetwo g s  page three amp  pagethree g  a txt   page one amp   page two amp   page three amp   Content of b txt after I run my sed command  pageone pagetwo pagethree  What I want b txt to contain   page one  page two  page three

User · Answer

add   before special characters   s   page one amp  page  one   g   etc

User · Answer

A very useful but lesser-known fact about sed is that the familiar s foo bar  command can use any punctuation  not only slashes   A common alternative is s foo bar   from which it becomes obvious how to solve your problem

User · Answer

this line should work for your 3 examples   sed -r  s    page      amp     amp    1  2 g  a txt    I used -r to save some escaping   the line should be generic for your one  two three case  you don t have to do the sub 3 times   test with your example  a txt    kent   echo   page one amp   page two amp   page three amp   sed -r  s    page      amp     amp    1  2 g   page one  page two  page three

User · Answer

In a system I am developing  the string to be replaced by sed is input text from a user which is stored in a variable and passed to sed   As noted earlier on this post  if the string contained within the sed command block contains the actual delimiter used by sed - then sed terminates on syntax error  Consider the following example   This works     VALUE 12345   echo  MyVar  DEF VALUE     sed -e s  DEF VALUE    VALUE  g MyVar 12345   This breaks     VALUE 12345 6   echo  MyVar  DEF VALUE     sed -e s  DEF VALUE    VALUE  g sed  -e expression  1  char 21  unknown option to  s    Replacing the default delimiter is not a robust solution in my case as I did not want to limit the user from entering specific characters used by sed as the delimiter  e g         However  escaping any occurrences of the delimiter in the input string would solve the problem  Consider the below solution of systematically escaping the delimiter character in the input string before having it parsed by sed  Such escaping can be implemented as a replacement using sed itself  this replacement is safe even if the input string contains the delimiter - this is since the input string is not part of the sed command block     VALUE   echo   VALUE    sed -e  s        g     echo  MyVar  DEF VALUE     sed -e s  DEF VALUE    VALUE  g MyVar 12345 6   I have converted this to a function to be used by various scripts   escapeForwardSlashes             Validate parameters      if   -z   1         then              echo -e  Error - no parameter specified                return 1      fi         Perform replacement      echo   1    sed -e  s        g       return 0

User · Answer

The easiest way would be to use a different delimiter in your search replace lines  e g    s  page one amp  pageone g   You can use any character as a delimiter that s not part of either string  Or  you could escape it with a backslash   s    foo    Which would replace   with foo  You d want to use the escaped backslash in cases where you don t know what characters might occur in the replacement strings  if they are shell variables  for example

User · Answer

Great answer from Anonymous    solved my problem when I tried to escape quotes in HTML strings   So if you use sed to return some HTML templates  on a server   use double backslash instead of single   var htmlTemplate     lt div style    color green     gt  lt  div gt

User · Answer

sed is the stream editor  in that you can use    pipe  to send standard streams  STDIN and STDOUT specifically  through sed and alter them programmatically on the fly  making it a handy tool in the Unix philosophy tradition  but can edit files directly  too  using the -i parameter mentioned below  Consider the following   sed -i -e  s few asd g  hello txt   s  is used to substitute the found expression few with asd      The few  the brave             The asd  the brave     g stands for  global   meaning to do this for the whole line  If you leave off the  g  with s few asd   there always needs to be three slashes no matter what  and few appears twice on the same line  only the first few is changed to asd      The few men  the few women  the brave             The asd men  the few women  the brave    This is useful in some circumstances  like altering special characters at the beginnings of lines  for instance  replacing the greater-than symbols some people use to quote previous material in email threads with a horizontal tab while leaving a quoted algebraic inequality later in the line untouched   but in your example where you specify that anywhere few occurs it should be replaced  make sure you have that  g   The following two options  flags  are combined into one  -ie   -i option is used to edit in place on the file hello txt   -e option indicates the expression command to run  in this case s    Note  It s important that you use -i -e to search replace  If you do -ie  you create a backup of every file with the letter  e  appended

User · Answer

replace txt should be   s  page    page   g s  amp   g

User · Answer

A simplier alternative is using AWK as on this answer    awk   0  prefix  0  file  gt  new file

User · Answer

please see this article http   netjunky net sed-replace-path-with-slash-separators  Just using   instead of

User · Answer

The s command can use any character as a delimiter  whatever character comes after the s is used  I was brought up to use a    Like so   s  page one amp   page one g

[sed] How to insert strings containing slashes with sed?

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