Re: sed question.
On Fri, 04 Jun 2004 17:30:28 +0200, Ralph Crongeyer
<ralph@crongeyer.com> wrote:
> Carlos Hanson wrote:
>
> >On Fri, 04 Jun 2004 10:31:07 -0400
> >Ralph Crongeyer <ralph@crongeyer.com> wrote:
> >
> >>I need to do a pattern match with sed of "(" and ")". I need to replace
> >>every ( with "(" and every ) with ")" on every line.
> >
> >sed 's/[()]/"&"/g'
> >
> Carlos, Thanks!
> By the way, what does the & mean?
Substitute the previously found string. So in this case, sed will
search (letter 's') for either a ( or a ) (character class [()]) and
replace it with a double quote, the previously found open or close
bracket and another double quote.
My advice: do some reading on regular expressions. For me, the book
'mastering regular expressions' by O'Reilly was really helpful.
There's SO much that you can do more effectively with regular
expressions and sed...
Last week, I had to extract a few lines of useful information from an
850MB logfile. My favorite editor (NEdit) had some memory problems and
refused to open it, but a small awk-program and a lot of regular
expressions with sed and grep got the job done in a matter of minutes.
--
Matthijs
vanaalten@hotmail.com
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