sed whole word search and replace

Question

How to replace whole words in string sed whole word search and replace

with sed in HP-UX (B.11.31)?

$ echo "bar embarassment" | sed "s/bar/no bar/g";

"\bbar\b" does not work
"\<bar\>" does not work
"[[:<:]]bar[[:>:]]" does not work

Install and use GNU `sed`? Use `perl` instead? Neither suggestion is wholly facetious. Historically, building GCC on HP-UX required a non-standard version of `sed` (effectively, GNU `sed`) because the one provided by HP had constraint limits that the GCC configuration script could not reasonably live within. I haven't built GCC on an HP-UX 11.x system (10.x was the last time), so I don't know if that is still a problem. — Jonathan Leffler, Aug 19 '11 at 14:09

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 19 '11 at 08:47

1

Try the -r option of sed with \b:

echo "bar embarassment" | sed -r "s/\bbar\b/no bar/g";

answered Aug 19 '11 at 08:47

codaddict

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 19 '11 at 12:15

1

Tested on solaris, not hpux

echo "bar embarassment bar foobar bar" | 
sed -e 's/\([^[:graph:]]\)bar$/\1no bar/g'  \
    -e 's/\([^[:graph:]]\)bar\([^[:graph:]]\)/\1no bar\2/g' \
    -e 's/^bar\([^[:graph:]]\)/no bar\1/g'

emits

no bar embarassment no bar foobar no bar

answered Aug 19 '11 at 12:15

glenn jackman

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Would `[:alnum:]` be better than `[:graph:]` since graphical characters are those which are visible and hence include punctuation? – Jonathan Leffler Aug 19 '11 at 14:07
Maybe. Depends on the OP's definition of "whole word", particularly as underscore is a `[:punct:]` character. – glenn jackman Aug 19 '11 at 14:19

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 19 '16 at 08:08

0

if you are in vim, you can use this command:

:% s/\<old\>/new/g

answered Nov 19 '16 at 08:08

arganzheng

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sed whole word search and replace

3 Answers3