sed and special char

Question

im trying the following sed command, but i have no luck with special chars:

echo "x#asdf" | sed "s/\([^-]\)#/\1\n/g"

x
asdf

but if i use some special char in test.txt

echo "ä#asdf" | sed "s/\([^-]\)#/\1\n/g"

ä#asdf

why ?

this works:

echo "ü#asdf" | sed "s/ü/-/g"
-#asdf

but this doesnt:

echo "ü#asdf" | sed "s/[ü]/-/g"
ü#asdf

Works fine here. There's nothing wrong with your sed script, must be related to your locale/file encoding. — chris, Nov 30 '10 at 10:59
It works for me in GNU sed version 4.2.1 in en_US.UTF-8 and de_DE.UTF-8. What version of `sed` is yours? — Dennis Williamson, Nov 30 '10 at 17:30
echo "ä#asdf" | sed "s/\\([^-]\\)#/\1\n/g" should output the same as echo "x#asdf" | sed "s/\\([^-]\\)#/\1\n/g" — gert, Dec 01 '10 at 10:57

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:26

I'm not sure about this, because your sed commands work ok for me (gnu sed 4.1.5), but try invoking sed this way:

$ LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 sed ...

See this post for more information: Why does sed fail with International characters and how to fix?.

If this doesn't work, it may help to upgrade to gnu sed 4.2, if you can. The NEWS file says "multibyte processing fixed" for 4.2 but does not go into further detail.

sed and special char

1 Answers1