sed rare-delimiter (other than & | / ?…)

Question

I\'ve to apply the Unix command sed on a string (can contain #, !, /, ?, &, @ and all other characters) which can contains all types of

Answer 1

Escaping the delimiter inline for BASH to parse is cumbersome and difficult to read (although the delimiter does need escaping for sed's benefit when it's first used, per-expression).

To pull together thkala's answer and user4401178's comment:

DELIM=$(echo -en "\001");
sed -n "\\${DELIM}${STARTING_SEARCH_TERM}${DELIM},\\${DELIM}${ENDING_SEARCH_TERM}${DELIM}p" "${FILE}"

This example returns all results starting from ${STARTING_SEARCH_TERM} until ${ENDING_SEARCH_TERM} that don't match the SOH (start of heading) character with ASCII code 001.

Answer 2

Wow. I totally did not know that you could use any character as a delimiter. At least half the time I use the sed and BREs its on paths, code snippets, junk characters, things like that. I end up with a bunch of horribly unreadable escapes which I'm not even sure won't die on some combination I didn't think of. But if you can exclude just some character class (or just one character even)

echo '#01Y $#1+!' | sed -e 'sa$#1+ashita' -e 'su#01YuHolyug'

> > > Holy shit! That's so much easier.