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OcK
Asked: 2018-06-14 04:45:04 +0800 CST

Find substring in file

  • 772

I have a file with text like following:

{name: "Jon", kids: [{i: 1, n: "tyrell"}, {i: 2, n: "angela"}, {i: 3, n: "elliot"}]

what I want to achieve is delete every string with ":i" so in this case it would look like this

{name: "Jon", kids: [{n: "tyrell"}, {n: "angela"}, {n: "elliot"}]

so if there is a "i:" it should delete everything (including the i:) up to the comma ","

How could I achieve something like this?

find 14.04 text-processing

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Given

    $ cat file
{name: "Jon", kids: [{i: 1, n: "tyrell"}, {i: 2, n: "angela"}, {i: 3, n: "elliot"}]

    then

    $ sed 's/i:[^,]*, //g' file
{name: "Jon", kids: [{n: "tyrell"}, {n: "angela"}, {n: "elliot"}]

    Add -i or --in-place to overwrite the contents of the original file

    However if your file contains structured data you should use the right tools for the job - yours looks almost like JSON aside from the unquoted keys and missing terminating brace:

    $ jq -c --null-input '
    {name: "Jon", kids: [{i: 1, n: "tyrell"}, {i: 2, n: "angela"}, {i: 3, n: "elliot"}]} | 
  del(.kids[].i)'
{"name":"Jon","kids":[{"n":"tyrell"},{"n":"angela"},{"n":"elliot"}]}
    • 3

  2. This one does what you ask for,

    <<< '{name: "Jon", kids: [{i: 1, n: "tyrell"}, {i: 2, n: "angela"}, {i: 3, n: "elliot"}]' sed 's/i: .,//g'

    This one does what you show (removes the space after the comma),

    <<< '{name: "Jon", kids: [{i: 1, n: "tyrell"}, {i: 2, n: "angela"}, {i: 3, n: "elliot"}]' sed 's/i: ., //g'

    What you want in the real case is to run sed with an input file

    sed 's/i: ., //g' file.in

    and probably redirect to an output file

    sed 's/i: ., //g' file.in > file.out
    • 1