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I'm am trying to replace a series of asterix symbols in a text file with a -999.9 using sed. However I can't figure out how to properly escape the wildcard symbol.
e.g.
$ echo "2006.0,1.0,************,-5.0" | sed 's/************/-999.9/g'
sed: 1: "s/************/-999.9/g": RE error: repetition-operator operand invalid
Doesn't work. And
$ echo "2006.0,1.0,************,-5.0" | sed 's/[************]/-999.9/g'
2006.0,1.0,-999.9-999.9-999.9-999.9-999.9-999.9-999.9-999.9-999.9-999.9-999.9-999.9,-5.0
puts a -999.9 for every * which isn't what I intended either.
Thanks!
677
You need to escape the special characters with a backslash \ in front of the special character. For your case, escape every special character with backslash \ .
Find and replace text within a file using sed command Use Stream EDitor (sed) as follows: sed -i 's/old-text/new-text/g' input.txt. The s is the substitute command of sed for find and replace. It tells sed to find all occurrences of 'old-text' and replace with 'new-text' in a file named input.txt.
\& works for me. For example, I can replace all instances of amp with & by using sed "s/amp/\&/g" . If you're still having problems, you should post a new question with your input string and your code. Yea it does.
Sed needs many characters to be escaped to get their special meaning. For example, if you escape a digit in the replacement string, it will turn in to a backreference. Remember, if you use a character other than / as delimiter, you need replace the slash in the expressions above wih the character you are using.
Use this:
echo "2006.0,1.0,************,-5.0" | sed 's/[*]\+/-999.9/g'
Test:
$ echo "2006.0,1.0,************,-5.0" | sed 's/[*]\+/-999.9/g'
2006.0,1.0,-999.9,-5.0
Any of these (and more) is a regexp that will modify that line as you want:
$ echo "2006.0,1.0,************,-5.0" | sed 's/\*\**/999.9/g'
2006.0,1.0,999.9,-5.0
$ echo "2006.0,1.0,************,-5.0" | sed 's/\*\+/999.9/g'
2006.0,1.0,999.9,-5.0
$ echo "2006.0,1.0,************,-5.0" | sed -r 's/\*+/999.9/g'
2006.0,1.0,999.9,-5.0
$ echo "2006.0,1.0,************,-5.0" | sed 's/\*\{12\}/999.9/g'
2006.0,1.0,999.9,-5.0
$ echo "2006.0,1.0,************,-5.0" | sed -r 's/\*{12}/999.9/g'
2006.0,1.0,999.9,-5.0
$ echo "2006.0,1.0,************,-5.0" | sed 's/\*\{1,\}/999.9/g'
2006.0,1.0,999.9,-5.0
$ echo "2006.0,1.0,************,-5.0" | sed -r 's/\*{1,}/999.9/g'
2006.0,1.0,999.9,-5.0
sed operates on regular expressions, not strings, so you need to learn regular expression syntax if you're going to use sed and in particular the difference between BREs (which sed uses by default) and EREs (which some seds can be told to use instead) and PCREs (which sed never uses but some other tools and "regexp checkers" do). Only the first solution above is a BRE that will work on all seds on all platforms. Google is your friend.
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