How to use a single sed command for this?

Question

I have this question:

Use a single SED command to transform the following text:

<h1>this is the h1 header</h1>

<h2>this is the h2 header</h2>

<h3>this is the h3 header</h3>

<h4>this is the h4 header</h4>

to this text:

  <div>this is the h1 header</div>

  <div>this is the h2 header</div>

  <div>this is the h3 header</div>

  <div>this is the h4 header</div>

this the answer I came up with but is there a way to do this in a single command? f3 is my filename

sed -e 's/<h.>/<div>/g' -e 's/<\/h.>/<\/div>/g' f3

You're welcome, thanks for the edit. Although I understand you don't want 2 or more `-e`, bear in mind that that is a single command indeed. — Quasímodo, Apr 13 '20 at 14:26
So until I used the keyword 'sed' again, it is a single command only, right? — Anirudh Giran, Apr 13 '20 at 14:27
[Don't Parse XML/HTML With Regex.](https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/3776858) I suggest to use an XML/HTML parser (xmlstarlet, xmllint ...). — Cyrus, Apr 13 '20 at 14:30
@Cyrus It has nothing to do with HTML, It's just that the professor gave us this practice document for sed command. — Anirudh Giran, Apr 13 '20 at 14:40
@Cyrus well I've my final exam tomorrow, god help his next batch — Anirudh Giran, Apr 13 '20 at 14:47

Ajanyan Pradeep · Answer 1 · 2020-04-13T15:05:23.800

1

You can use

sed 's/h[1-4]/div/g' f3

edited Apr 13 '20 at 15:05

answered Apr 13 '20 at 14:33

Ajanyan Pradeep

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 13 '20 at 14:29

0

sed 's|<[^>]*>\(.*\)</[^>]*>|<div>\1</div>|' f3

answered Apr 13 '20 at 14:29

Quasímodo

This one worked, but why are we using pipe( | ) in the sed command? What purpose does it serve? – Anirudh Giran Apr 13 '20 at 14:45
The delimiter we see most is `/`, but barely any character is valid. The advantage here is that we don't have to escape the `/` in `/div`. – Quasímodo Apr 13 '20 at 14:54

2 Answers2