Use sed to add background color to tabs?

Question

Is possible to use sed to change the background color of tabs (or any other text), so that, for example, I could run something like the following?

somefunction | sed -e 's/(some pattern)/(set bg color)\1(unset bg color)/g'

Answer 1

Yes:

#!/bin/bash

norm_bg=$(tput sgr0)
red_bg=$(tput setab 1)

echo -e "foo\tbar\tbaz" | sed "s/\t/$red_bg    $norm_bg/g"

See this link for other Color Codes (very bottom)