using sed to fix up HTML oversight

garage_greg

I'm using the following command to update HTML files sed -e "s/SRC=$[A-Za-z0-9.\/_-]*$/SRC=\"\1\" /gi" I'm having trouble adding + and & to the above as valid filename/path characters. My best understanding is that these special characters need to be escaped, like so: sed -e "s/SRC=$[A-Za-z0-9.\/_-\+\&]*$/SRC=\"\1\" /gi" but I suspect the added bash command line complexity has me stimied. TIA.

Originally asked by user2407626 on Stack Exchange (askubuntu) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

AFAIK & is only special on the RHS of a sed substitution command (re-substituting the whole matched pattern), and + is only special in extended regular expression (ERE) mode i.e. when using the -E or -r command line options, and then only outside of a bracket expression [ ... ] . Likewise you don't need to escape the / delimiter inside a bracket expression. Your issue here is likely that - needs to be first or last when used inside a bracket expression - else the expression becomes a character range . So $ echo 'SRC=dir/foo&bar+baz' | sed -e "s/SRC=$[A-Za-z0-9./_+&-]*$/SRC=\"\1\" /gi" SRC="dir/foo&bar+baz" or (using single quotes to further simplify the quoting) $ echo...

Full answer by steeldriver: https://askubuntu.stackexchange.com/a/1568457 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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