I\'m having trouble getting sed to recognize both hyphen and underscore in its pattern string.
Does anyone know why
[a-z|A-Z|0-9|\\-|_]
You don't need to use |
symbol in a regex character class to separate the characters. Perhaps try something like this ...
[a-zA-Z0-9\-_]
As mentioned, you don't need anything to separate your ranges in a bracket expression. All that will do is adding |
to the characters matched by the expression.
Then, to add a hyphen, you can put it as the first or last character in the expression:
[a-zA-Z0-9_-]
And finally, ranges like a-z
don't necessarily mean abcd...xyz
, depending on your locale. You could use a POSIX character class instead:
[[:alnum:]_-]
Where [:alnum:]
corresponds to all alphanumeric characters of your locale. In the C
locale, it corresponds to 0-9A-Za-z
.
$ sed 's/.*\(service-type = [a-z|A-Z|0-9|_-]*\);.*\(address = .*\);.*/\1 \2/g' sed_underscore_hypen.txt
service-type = service-1 address = address1
service-type = service_1 address = address1
pknga_000@miro MINGW64 ~/Documents
$ sed 's/.*\(service-type = [-a-z|A-Z|0-9|_]*\);.*\(address = .*\);.*/\1 \2/g' sed_underscore_hypen.txt
service-type = service-1 address = address1
service-type = service_1 address = address1
To match a hyphen in a character class, it must not be placed between two characters, otherwise it will be interpreted as a range operator. So to match a hyphen, place it at the beginning or end of the character class: and no escaping is necessary. See this answer for explanation: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4068725
In my case, I wanted to replace a config setting that included a hyphen. Surrounding the setting in .*
worked:
sed 's/.*some-service.*/some-service="new-value"/g' file
Also works when the config setting has an underscore.