Regular expression not working on sed

Question

I am trying to use sed to change the format of decimal numbers in a large CSV file before importing it into a SQLite database. They all have two decimal places, may be negative use comma as a decimal separator and are therefore escaped with double quotes. I was trying the following:

sed 's/"(-?)([:digit:]+),([:digit:]{2})"/$1$2.$3/g' input.csv > output.csv

The regex seems to work on a text editor on a sample of the file, but when running it through sed, there are no changes to the original file. What am I doing wrong?

Seconded - in the format you've presented -r is a requirement. Depending on sed version [:digit:] may be a problem as well - [0-9] works just as well. — mikeserv, Mar 15 '14 at 09:04
Apart from adding -r, i.e. enable extended regex syntax, change [:digit:] to [[:digit:]] or [0-9]. — devnull, Mar 15 '14 at 09:08
Thanks! I'm getting an error saying that -r is an illegal option. — user1608941, Mar 15 '14 at 10:11
sed only changes the original file if you use the "in-place" option -i. By default, it just prints the edited text to stdout. — n.st, Mar 15 '14 at 11:14
Also, if you plan to use sed, you should probably go download and build the GNU version. You'll thank yourself later. — mikeserv, Mar 15 '14 at 13:47
More generally, see Why does my regular expression work in X but not in Y? — Gilles 'SO- stop being evil', Mar 16 '14 at 04:31

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 15 '14 at 13:11

1

Since -r is unavailable, use this leaning toothpick forest:

sed 's/"\(-?[[:digit:]]\+\),\([[:digit:]]\{2\}\)"/\1.\2/g' input.csv > output.csv

sed -r is a GNU extension. And sadly, most tools that use regular expressions implement the language slightly differently (grep/sed, awk, perl, ...)

answered Mar 15 '14 at 13:11

glenn jackman

85,964

Thanks, I also ended up downloading and building the GNU sed for future use! – user1608941 Mar 15 '14 at 21:56

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 16 '14 at 05:22

0

I find Perl's syntax simpler for such things (I am ignoring the quotes but you can add them if you wish):

perl -pe 's/(-*)(\d+),(\d{0,2})/$1$2.$3/g' input.csv > output.csv

You can also use the -i option to edit the original file directly.

answered Mar 16 '14 at 05:22

terdon

242,166

Regular expression not working on sed

2 Answers2