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Rare Sed Delimiters

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Background

One can replace the usual delimiter / in sed with the other ones. Therefore, the slashes in the URL inside the search pattern won’t have to be escaped by backslashes, which makes the whole command ugly.

Problem

If the search pattern contains multiple characters like ;, #, |,   (white space), etc, and you’re too lazy to look for other choices of delimiters, what can you do?

Discussion on the custom delimiter

When I read article at the above link, I was stuck at the last part, which was about using a custom delimiter. I mistakenly thought that this was for the search pattern and the replacement. In fact, reading GNU’s manual and trying some commands repeatedly, I realized that prepending the custom delimiter with a backslash was for specifying the range of the following expresion.

Therefore, I finally understand what somevar is in this Stack Overflow question.

Solution

Customizing the delimiter in a replacement

To begin with, I tried the following command.

$ echo strange | sed s/'[a-e]'/#/g
str#ng#

After that, I know that surrounding the whole s command isn’t a must, just the regex and replacement will do.

Then I replaced all / with y in the above command.

$ echo strange | sed sy'[a-e]'y#yg
str#ng#

Now, it’s clear that the custom delimiter in the s command doesn’t need to be escaped.

Towards the goal

The goal in this post is to use bizarre characters as the delimiter in the s command, and I believe that if you’ve reached here, you’ll probably understand what this command is doing, provided that you know the way to input control characters as arguments in bash commands.

More examples

I’ve just tried to delete a <script> tag in the master branch of a repository for my sample W3CSS page using the in-place editing option of sed. Before making real changes to the file, I tested my command syntax with the standard output first.

[owner@localhost ~/SampleWebPage]$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/gh-pages
  remotes/origin/master
[owner@localhost ~/SampleWebPage]$ sed -nr '\#<scr#,#</scr#p' ex0.html
sed: -e expression #1, char 9: unexpected `,'

Looking at the manual again, I thought that \%regex% represented one address only. The pattern after the comma was another address, so I should have used two backslashes in the last command.

[owner@localhost ~/SampleWebPage]$ sed -ir '\#<scr#,\#</scr#' ex0.html

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