using sed to find and replace in bash for loop

Question

I have a large number of words in a text file to replace.

This script is working up until the sed command where I get:

sed: 1: \"*.js\": inval

Answer 1

Another approach, if you don't feel very confident with sed and think you are going to forget in a week what the meaning of that voodoo symbols is, could be using IFS in a more efficient way:

IFS=":"
cat myFile.txt | while read PATTERN REPLACEMENT  # You feed the while loop with stdout lines and read fields separated by ":"
do
   sed -i "s/${PATTERN}/${REPLACEMENT}/g"
done

The only pitfall I can see (it may be more) is that if whether PATTERN or REPLACEMENT contain a slash (/) they are going to destroy your sed expression. You can change the sed separator with a non-printable character and you should be safe. Anyway, if you know whats on your myFile.txt you can just use any.