3

Here's a sample 'test.txt'

abcdX1yad45das
abcdX2fad45das
abcdX3had45das
abcdX4wad45das
abcdX5mad45das

sample desired output:

X1yad
X2fad
X3had
X4wad
X5mad

I could get it working in vim with:

:% s/\v.*(X\d)(.*)45.*/\1\2/

and worked in perl as well with:

open(my $file, "<", "test.txt");
while(<$file>)
{
    s/.*(X\d)(.*)45.*/$1$2/; 
    print $_;
}

my eventual regular expression needs two groupings, it wasn't required for this example output

am not able to get it work with sed:

sed -r 's/.*(X\d)(.*)45.*/\1\2/' test.txt
abcdX1yad45das
abcdX2fad45das
abcdX3had45das
abcdX4wad45das
abcdX5mad45das

just to check sed is working,

sed -r 's/(a)/#\1#/' test.txt
#a#bcdX1yad45das
#a#bcdX2fad45das
#a#bcdX3had45das
#a#bcdX4wad45das
#a#bcdX5mad45das

what am I doing wrong in sed?

Sundeep
  • 12,008

3 Answers3

5

sed does not understand \d. You can use [0-9] or, more generally, [[:digit:]] in its place: 

$ sed -r 's/.*(X[[:digit:]])(.*)45.*/\1\2/' test.txt
X1yad
X2fad
X3had
X4wad
X5mad

Note that [[:digit:]] is unicode-safe but [0-9] is not.

John1024
  • 74,655
  • 1
    thanks, I think I've come across this before and forgot... – Sundeep Apr 27 '16 at 05:27
  • 1
    @spasic : On the contrary, vim do understand [[:digit:]] & [0-9]. You might wish to stick on with one format – sjsam Apr 27 '16 at 06:57
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    yup, will keep this in mind.. but hard to change years of usage – Sundeep Apr 27 '16 at 08:02
  • Note \d and [[:digit:]] are the same, but [0-9] is different in (e.g.) Unicode where there are digit codepoints that are not within [0-9]. – abligh Apr 27 '16 at 10:53
1
sed 's/abcd\(X[0-9][a-z]ad\)45das/\1/g' your_file_name

should do it.

sjsam
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0

You sed does not understand the special sequence \d. Replace \d with [0-9] or character class [:digit:]:

$ cat file.txt
abcdX1yad45das
abcdX2fad45das
abcdX3had45das
abcdX4wad45das
abcdX5mad45das

$ sed -nr 's/.*(X\d)(.*)45.*/\1\2/p' file.txt   

$ sed -nr 's/.*(X[0-9])(.*)45.*/\1\2/p' file.txt
X1yad
X2fad
X3had
X4wad
X5mad
heemayl
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