How to enclose every line in a file in double quotes with sed?

Question

This is what I tried: sed -i 's/^.*/"$&"/' myFile.txt

It put a $ at the beginning of every line.

Sorry, I mean to say it put a $ at the beginning of each line. Edited. Without the ampersand it does nothing — nw., Jul 01 '11 at 23:30
both work fine here.. I have no idea what kind of sed you are using — Karoly Horvath, Jul 01 '11 at 23:36
The `&` does not need the `$`, you're just getting a literal `$`. Based on your comments I think you have a shell quoting problem, not a `sed` problem. — Ben Jackson, Jul 01 '11 at 23:37
This worked: 's/^.*$/\"&\"/'. I had to escape the double quotes (but with sed's escape character, not powershell's). I am using sed from GnuWin32. Is this not necessary using other builds of sed? — nw., Jul 01 '11 at 23:54
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6714165/powershell-stripping-double-quotes-from-command-line-arguments — nw., Jul 19 '11 at 00:42

score 47 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 01 '11 at 23:18

47

here it is

sed 's/\(.*\)/"\1"/g'

answered Jul 01 '11 at 23:18

Karoly Horvath

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hmm, this one seems to have no effect at all. – nw. Jul 01 '11 at 23:24
do i need to escape double quotes in powershell or something? – nw. Jul 01 '11 at 23:24
Works great on OS X Yosemite. – funroll Nov 13 '14 at 18:19
For unix/linux beginners, you may want to do something like `cat filename.txt | sed 's/$.*$/"\1"/g'` to feed your input into sed. – Josh Padnick Jan 19 '16 at 00:27
2

`cat file | ` is a classically incorrect use of `cat`. Use file redirection to pass files into standard input: `sed 's/$.*$/"\1"/g' < filename.txt`. – Backgammon Apr 04 '19 at 17:02

score 22 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 02 '11 at 20:50

22

shorter

sed 's/.*/"&"/'

without spaces

sed 's/ *\(.*\) *$/"\1"/'

skip empty lines

sed '/^ *$/d;s/.*/"&"/'

answered Jul 02 '11 at 20:50

clt60

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score 6 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 01 '11 at 23:36

6

You almost got it right. Try this slightly modified version:

sed 's/^.*$/"&"/g' file.txt

answered Jul 01 '11 at 23:36

anubhava

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Julian de Bhal · Answer 4 · 2015-07-25T06:33:30.720

2

You can also do it without a capture group:

sed 's/^\|$/"/g'

'^' matches the beginning of the line, and '$' matches the end of the line.

The | is an "Alternation", It just means "OR". It needs to be escaped here[1], so in english ^\|$ means "the beginning or the end of the line".

"Replacing" these characters is fine, it just appends text to the beginning at the end, so we can substitute for ", and add the g on the end for a global search to match both at once.

[1] Unfortunately, it turns out that | is not part of the POSIX "Basic Regular Expressions" but part of "enhanced" functionality that can be compiled in with the REG_ENHANCED flag, but is not by default on OSX, so you're safer with a proper basic capture group like s/^$.*$$/"\1"/

Humble pie for me today.

edited Jul 25 '15 at 06:33

answered Sep 18 '14 at 03:47

Julian de Bhal

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If you understand the magic of sed, can you explain what this is actually doing? – funroll Jul 24 '15 at 16:35
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I've tried all the answers listed above, nothing works for me but this trick does! Thanks. – ASten Dec 28 '16 at 12:02

How to enclose every line in a file in double quotes with sed?

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