Addition with 'sed'

Question

I am trying to perform a mathematical operation with sed, but it continues to treat my variables as strings. The input is of this kind:

$ echo 12 | sed 's/[0-9]*/&+3/'
$ 12+3

I'd like to have 15 as output. I need to do the operation and replace its mathematical result in only one passage, because I am running the program as a Python daemon, and I want to avoid passages like redirecting stdout on files, open those files, perform operations, extract the result, do the replacement. To me, sed seems the best to perform all in one line.

I've tried to cast both input and output in various ways like

$ echo 12 | sed 's/[0-9]*/int(&+3)/'
$ echo 12 | sed 's/[0-9]*/\int(&+3)/'
$ echo 12 | sed 's/[0-9]*/\int(&+3)/'

but the result was always a printing of the second field.

Answer 1

If you honestly want to use sed, then this is the way to go:

s/[0-9]/<&/g
s/0//g; s/1/|/g; s/2/||/g; s/3/|||/g; s/4/||||/g; s/5/|||||/g; s/6/||||||/g
s/7/|||||||/g; s/8/||||||||/g; s/9/|||||||||/g
: tens
s/|</<||||||||||/g
t tens
s/<//g
s/+//g
: minus
s/|-|/-/g
t minus
s/-$//
: back
s/||||||||||/</g
s/<\([0-9]*\)$/<0\1/
s/|||||||||/9/; s/||||||||/8/; s/|||||||/7/; s/||||||/6/; s/|||||/5/; s/||||/4/
s/|||/3/; s/||/2/; s/|/1/
s/</|/g
t back

Input:

1+2
100+250
100-250

Output:

3
350
-150

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to implement multiplication.

Answer 2

sed isn't the best option here, it doesn't do arithmetics natively (see Increment a number for how you could possibly do it though). You could do that with awk:

$ echo 12 | awk '{print $0+3}'
15

The best piece of code to use will depend on the exact format of your input and what you want/need to do if it is not numeric, or contains more than one number, etc.

You could also do this only with bash:

$ echo $(( $(echo 12) + 3 ))

or using expr in a similar fashion.

Answer 3

perl allows for a very similar construct to sed's ... one difference is that perl can do more complex things... sed is very good for simple text substitions

 echo 'a12' | perl -pe 's/([0-9]+)/($1+3)/e'  # the trailing /e means evaluate

output

a15

Answer 4

just feed the string into a calculator

 echo 12 | sed 's/[0-9]*/&+3/' | bc

Answer 5

If you definitely have to combine regular expressions and arithmetic operations, choose a language where the regular expression's replacement parameter can be a callback function.

Perl, Ruby, JavaScript and Python are such languages:

bash-4.2$ echo 12 | perl -pe 's/\d+/$&+3/e'
15

bash-4.2$ echo 12 | ruby -pe '$_.sub!(/\d+/){|s|s.to_i+3}'
15

bash-4.2$ echo 12 | js -e 'print(readline().replace(/\d+/,function(s){return parseInt(s)+3}))'
15

bash-4.2$ echo 12 | python -c 'import re;print re.sub("\d+",lambda s:str(int(s.group(0))+3),raw_input())'
15

Answer 6

I tried to accept your challenge @Richter, this is what I did using part of your code:

sed 's/[0-9]/<&/g
s/0//g; s/1/|/g; s/2/||/g; s/3/|||/g; s/4/||||/g; s/5/|||||/g; s/6/||||||/g
s/7/|||||||/g; s/8/||||||||/g; s/9/|||||||||/g
: tens
s/|</<||||||||||/g
t tens
s/<//g
s/.*\*$/0/
s/^\*.*/0/
s/*|/*/
: mult
s/\(|*\)\*|/\1<\1*/ 
t mult
s/*//g
s/<//g
: back
s/||||||||||/</g
s/<\([0-9]*\)$/<0\1/
s/|||||||||/9/; s/||||||||/8/; s/|||||||/7/; s/||||||/6/; s/|||||/5/; s/||||/4/
s/|||/3/; s/||/2/; s/|/1/
s/</|/g
t back'

Input:

04*3
4*3
40*3
42*32
150*20
1*3
3*1
0*3
3*0

Output: all the correct results

Answer 7

Another simple bash solution, that actually works in a pipe:

 echo 12 | { read num; echo $(( num + 3)); }

Answer 8

If you mix in some bashism:

echo $(($(echo 12 | sed 's/[0-9]*/&+3/')))

To extract the number from a text:

echo $(($(echo "foo12bar" | sed -r 's/[^0-9]*([0-9]*).*/\1+3/')))

Without sed, just bash:

var="foo12bar"
echo $((${var//[^0-9]/}+3))

replaces every non-digit ${var//[^0-9]/} and does arithmetic in double round parens: $((x+3))

Answer 9

I really don't get why the extreme complexity of the accepted answer, either of the below do what you want:

echo 12 | sed 's/[0-9]*/echo \$(( & + 3 ))/e'

or

echo 12 | sed 's/[0-9]*/expr & + 3/e'

I think it might require GNU sed, but I am not sure.