Is there a tr for translating into longer strings?

Question

tr is great for translating a set of characters to another set of characters. Sometimes, I want to translate a set of characters to a set of strings, e.g. all < and > to < and >.

Pulling out sed/awk/perl for such a task seems unnecessary. Is there another common command that can accomplish simple substitutions?

Answer 1

I don't know which shell you are using, but chances are tr is not a builtin. It's sure not for me in bash or zsh :) Try running type tr to see for yourself.

In all likelyhood, sed is the right tool for the job. It's what it was made for. As appropriate perl and awk too.

If you have very simple cases and if you are working with a string variable instead of a pipeline, you might get away with a real builtin such as using bash's string search and replace on a variable.

string="Stuf with <tag> in it."
escaped=${string//</&lt;}
escaped=${escaped//>/&gt;}
echo $escaped

Answer 2

Replacing multiple strings with another set of multiple strings becomes messy if you want to use standard parameter handling. Usually, commands take a set of atomic parameters, and then a set of atomic arguments, and the sequence doesn't matter other than that arguments come after parameters (separated by -- if ambiguous). How would you construct the synopsis in this case?

Here's a simple function which should do the job for simple replacements:

$ trs() {
    local string=$1
    shift
    for replacement in "$@"
    do
        string="$(sed -e "s/$replacement/g" <<< "$string")"
    done
    printf "$string"
}
$ trs '1 2 3' '1/foo' '2 3/bar baz'
foo bar baz

Alternatively you could work with pairs of parameters:

$ trs() {
    local string=$1
    shift
    while [ $# -gt 0 ]
    do
        string="$(sed -e "s/$1/$2/g" <<< "$string")"
        shift 2
    done
    printf "$string"
}
$ trs '1 2 3' 1 foo '2 3' 'bar baz'
foo bar baz

Answer 3

sed can be scary, but simple character to string substitution with sed isn't really too bad.

To substitute x with the string bar, do:

{something-that-outputs-something-on-stdout} | sed -e 's/x/bar/g'

if it's a file you're wanting to process, you can use:

sed -e '/s/x/bar/g' {filename}

(The "g" at the end means "global" which means substitute all occurrences in the line and not just the first one found)