sed is replacing whole line instead of just the string

Question

I want to just replace few strings in file with nothing, but sed replaces the whole line. Can someone help me with this?

line in file.xml:

<tag>sample text1 text2</tag>

My code:

 sed "s/'text1 text2'//" file.xml 2>/dev/null || :

I also tried

 sed -i -e "s/'text1 text2'//" file.xml 2>/dev/null || :

expected result:

<tag>sample</tag>

Actual result:

The whole line is removed from file.

Others:

text1 and text 2 are complex text with .=- characters in it

What can I do to fix this?

TIA

That regex doesn't match the line you've shown us, so there must be something else going on. Please post a [mcve]. — melpomene, Jun 10 '18 at 19:33
[Don't Parse XML/HTML With Regex.](https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/3776858) I suggest to use an XML/HTML parser (xmlstarlet, xmllint ...). — Cyrus, Jun 11 '18 at 01:04

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 11 '18 at 01:05

1

Remove the single quotes:

sed "s/text1 text2//" file.xml

edited Jun 11 '18 at 01:05

Cyrus

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answered Jun 10 '18 at 19:33

Leonard

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It still removes the line – user1164061 Jun 10 '18 at 21:20
Well that's puzzling. It works for me. $ sed "s/text1 text2//" txt.xml ----> sample – Leonard Jun 10 '18 at 21:24
Maybe cos I have an example which does not match reality! what if text1 and text 2 have characters - & = in them? e.g text1 is actually -text=1 and text2 is actually -text=2? So I need to replace -text=1 -text=2 with nothing – user1164061 Jun 10 '18 at 22:15

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 11 '18 at 10:27

You could use

sed 's/\([^ ]*\)[^<]*\(.*\)/\1\2/' filename

Output:

<tag>sample</tag>

Grouping is used. First all characters till a space are grouped together, then all characters till a < are matched and all following characters are grouped into another group.

sed is replacing whole line instead of just the string

2 Answers2