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CIsForCookies
Asked: 2019-02-12 04:42:51 +0800 CST

How can I remove enclosing brackets from a line?

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Given a line like this: "hello my (name) is (user), how can I remove all '()' using sed?

What I'm currently doing is highlighting the line using visual block, and then :s/(//g and again for ). Is there a way to remove both (, ) in one sed command?

My end goal is "hello my name is user"

sed text-processing

3 Answers

  1. You can use character class [()] as Regex pattern, and replace the pattern with empty string to remove them:

    sed 's/[()]//g'

    So:

    % sed 's/[()]//g' <<<"hello my (name) is (user)"
hello my name is user

    g modifier does the operation on all matches, otherwise sed will stop after the first match.

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  2. Best Answer

    You can use tr -d '()' <infile too.

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  3. You can save the bracket content in a group and replace by that:

    sed 's/(\([^)]*\))/\1/g'

    This saves everything inside the brackets ([^)]* simply matches everything except )) in group 1 and replaces the whole bracket by it. Doing that globally means to do it for every pair of brackets in the line.

    Usage example

    $ echo '"hello my (name) is (user)"' | sed 's/(\([^)]*\))/\1/g'
"hello my name is user"
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