How do you “debug” a regular expression with sed?

Question

I\'m trying to use a regexp using sed. I\'ve tested my regex with kiki, a gnome application to test regexpd, and it works in kiki.

date: 2010-10-29          


        

Answer 1

In sed you need to escape the curly braces. "s/author:\s[0-9]\{11\};//g" should work.

Sed has no debug capability. To test you simplify at the command line iteratively until you get something to work and then build back up.

command line input:

$ echo 'xx a: 00123 b: 5432' | sed -e 's/a:\s[0-9]\{5\}//'

command line output:

xx  b: 5432