White space pattern matching using sed

Question

I am writing a bash script to replace a pattern in a line containing white space. Text looks like this - property name="abcd" value="1234" and the value changes multiple times in the file like value=3456 and value=3689. Only the line containing name="abcd" and value=something something should be replaced.

There are other instance where abcd and value are called separately which should NOT be replaced.

I want to match both criteria name="abcd" and value before doing replacement. Something like

sed -i '/name="abcd" value=/c\property name="abcd" value="set"' filename

How do I resolve that whitespace between "abcd" and value so that sed can recognize it as a single string?

Input:

`property name="abcd" value="1234"`
`property name="abcd" value="73845"`
`property name="abcd" value="8276"`
`property name="qwerty" value="1234"`
`blah blah ${abcd} blah`

Desired output:

`property name="abcd" value="set"`
`property name="abcd" value="set"`
`property name="abcd" value="set"`
`property name="qwerty" value="1234"`
`blah blah ${abcd} blah`

In other words you want to replace `1234` and others by `blank` ? — Casimir et Hippolyte, Jul 30 '13 at 20:10
I don't really understand your question, but you should *probably* be using an XML parser . . . — ruakh, Jul 30 '13 at 20:10
Yes, replace the value with the string Blank for all instances matching the criteria — Rahul, Jul 30 '13 at 20:13
The only common pattern for all the lines is name="abcd" value. I want to match that pattern and do a line replacement — Rahul, Jul 30 '13 at 20:17

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:11

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If I understand correctly, you have name="blah" value="blah" on seperate lines, and want to just remove the \n

    sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ /g'

would do what you want taken from How can I replace a newline (\n) using sed?

edited May 23 '17 at 12:11

Community

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answered Jul 30 '13 at 20:16

Rummy

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No, value is different on each line. I want that to be replaced by the string "blah" – Rahul Jul 30 '13 at 20:18

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 31 '13 at 15:26

After a few trial and errors, I hit upon the solution

`sed -i "/V.prop.*value=/c\ <property name=\\\"V.prop\\\" value=\\\"set\\\"/>" filename`

The .* fills in between the two search patterns in the same line. The \\ is used for escaping double quotes.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 31 '13 at 18:32

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Try this:

sed -i -r 's/(property name="abcd" value=)"[0-9]+"/\1"set"/' filename

answered Jul 31 '13 at 18:32

Ansgar Wiechers

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White space pattern matching using sed

3 Answers3