I am trying to replace multiple words in a txt file.
An example with two lines would be
phone number: 123 addr: xyz
phone no: 456 home address: abc
Lets say that I'd like to replace "phone number" and "phone no" with phonenum and "addr" & "address" with address1.
Currently I only know how to do it with running multiple sed commands and I'm looking for some guidance to find a more efficient way.
Thank you!
Use Perl, with the hash whose keys are the words to be replaced, and values - their desired replacements. The string of keys joined on a pipe serves as the pattern in substitution operator s///g, with the /g modifier to enable multiple substitutions per line.
echo "phone number: 123 addr: xyz\nphone no: 456 home address: abc" > in.txt
perl -lpe '
BEGIN {
%re = (
q{phone number} => q{phonenum},
q{phone no} => q{phonenum},
q{addr} => q{address1},
q{address} => q{address1},
);
$re_str = join q{|}, keys %re; # "phone number|phone no|addr|address"
}
s/\b($re_str)\b/$re{$1}/g;
' in.txt > out.txt
Output in file out.txt:
phonenum: 123 address1: xyz
phonenum: 456 home address1: abc
The Perl one-liner uses these command line flags:
-e : Tells Perl to look for code in-line, instead of in a file.
-p : Loop over the input one line at a time, assigning it to $_ by default. Add print $_ after each loop iteration.
-l : Strip the input line separator ("\n" on *NIX by default) before executing the code in-line, and append it when printing.
q{...} : an alternative method to specify single-quoted strings ('...' are not used here because they have to be escaped within single-quoted Perl one-liner).
s/\b($re_str)\b/$re{$1}/g; : Parenthesis around $re_str capture the pattern into $1 variable. \b means word break, that is, either the start or the end of a word. Adding \b is needed to prevent replacing, for example, home address with home address1ess, depending on the order of evaluation.
SEE ALSO:
perldoc perlrun: how to execute the Perl interpreter: command line switches
perldoc perlre: Perl regular expressions (regexes)
perldoc perlrequick: Perl regular expressions quick start
