Regex replacing hyphens in attributes name only

Question

I have a string that looks something like this.

<tag-name i-am-an-attribute="123" and-me-too="321">

All I want to do is replace the dashes into an underscore, but the tag-name should remain like it is.

Hope there are some regex guru's who can help me out.

[solution] In case someone needs this.
I ended up with a perl oneliner command
echo '<tag-name i-am-an-attribute="123" and-me-too="321">' | perl -pe 's/( \K[^*"]*)-/$1_/g;' | perl -pe 's/ / /g;'
results in

<tag-name i_am_an_attribute="123" and_me_too="321">

Sed has no lookahead/lookbehind support which means this is most likely impossible. — OGHaza, Nov 22 '13 at 16:00
[Don't parse xml with regular expressions](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/7552) — glenn jackman, Nov 22 '13 at 18:10
I'm not parsing it. I've used @perreal his method to replace in place. — user3022139, Nov 25 '13 at 12:32

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 22 '13 at 19:08

1

Using sed:

sed ':l;s/-\([^- ]*\)\( *=\)/_\1\2/g;tl' input

Gives:

<tag-name i_am_an_attribute="123" and_me_too="321">

answered Nov 22 '13 at 19:08

perreal

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 22 '13 at 23:42

With <tag-name i-am-an-attribute="123" and-me-too="321"> as a line in a file:-

read -r < file

fullstring=$(echo "${REPLY}" | sed s'@-name @-name:@')

field1=$(echo "${fullstring}" | cut -d':' f1)
field2=$(echo "${fullstring}" | cut -d':' f2)

fixedfield=$(echo "${field2}" | sed s'@-@_@'g)

echo "${field1} ${fixedfield}"

I'm discovering that the most important thing, with scripting, is to provide yourself anchors within the text, that you can use to cut it up into segments that you can then perform operations on. Try to format your text as actual fields with seperators; it makes life a lot easier.

Regex replacing hyphens in attributes name only

2 Answers2