regular expression to replace an xml attribute

Question

I have an xml file of the form:

<property name="foo" value="this is a long value">stuff</property>

There are many properties but I want to match the one with name foo and then replace its value attribute with something else as so:

<property name="foo" value="yet another long value">stuff</property>

I was thinking to write a regular expression to match everything after "foo" to the end of the tag ( ">" ) and replace that, but I can't seem to get the syntax right.

I'm trying to do this using sed, if that's any help.

Answer 1

/property name=\"foo\" value=\"([^\"]*)\"/

Then just replace the first submatch with the new value of your wishing.

Answer 2

You probably don't want to use a regex for manipulating an xml file. Please instead consider xslt, which is aware of xml rules and won't cause your transformed document to become malformed.