Using sed to split a string with a delimiter

Question

I have a string in the following format:

string1:string2:string3:string4:string5

I'm trying to use sed to split the string on : and print each sub-string on a new line. Here is what I'm doing:

cat ~/Desktop/myfile.txt | sed s/:/\\n/

This prints:

string1 string2:string3:string4:string5 

How can I get it to split on each delimiter?

Answer 1

To split a string with a delimiter with GNU sed you say:

sed 's/delimiter/\n/g'     # GNU sed 

For example, to split using : as a delimiter:

$ sed 's/:/\n/g' <<< "he:llo:you" he llo you 

Or with a non-GNU sed:

$ sed $'s/:/\\\n/g' <<< "he:llo:you" he llo you 

---

In this particular case, you missed the g after the substitution. Hence, it is just done once. See:

$ echo "string1:string2:string3:string4:string5" | sed s/:/\\n/g string1 string2 string3 string4 string5 

g stands for global and means that the substitution has to be done globally, that is, for any occurrence. See that the default is 1 and if you put for example 2, it is done 2 times, etc.

All together, in your case you would need to use:

sed 's/:/\\n/g' ~/Desktop/myfile.txt 

Note that you can directly use the sed ... file syntax, instead of unnecessary piping: cat file | sed.