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I'm using sed to find and replace patterns within SAS files I have rather than changing them individually. The problem is I am trying to replace macro variables and when I use the ampersand it is not processing correctly.
Here's my code:
sed -ie 's/user=&uid./user=&sysuserid./g' *_table_*.sas
whenever I run this command it seems to append and do all kinds of funky stuff with the original text.
Question: How do I replace text that contains ampersands with sed command?
& is special in the replacement text: it means “the whole part of the input that was matched by the pattern”, so what you're doing here replaces user=&uidX with user=user=&uidXsysuserid.. To insert an actual ampersand in the replacement text, use \&.
Another thing that looks wrong is that . in the search pattern stands for any character (except a newline), but the . at the end of the replacement text is a literal dot. If you want to replace only the literal string user=&uid., protect the . with a backslash.
sed -e 's/user=&uid\./user=\&sysuserid./g'
If you want to replace any one character and preserve it in the result, put the character in a group and use \1 in the replacement to refer to that group.
sed -e 's/user=&uid\(.\)/user=\&sysuserid\1/g'
In fact, given the repetition between the original text and the replacement, you should use groups anyway:
sed -e 's/\(user=&\)u\(id\.\)/\1sysuser\2/g'
i.e. “replace u by sysuser between user=& and id.”.
\(user=&\) is a pattern that matches user& and stores the match string as a group (group number 1 since it's the first group in the pattern). Then in the replacement \1 is replaced by the string stored for group number 1.
Jul 20, 2016 at 0:57
= in regular expressions and in replacement text stands for itself, so user=& matches only user=&, and user=& in the replacement text yields user= followed by the part of the line matched by the regex.
Aug 17, 2016 at 13:27
= character does not have any special meaning. user=& in the replacement text produces user= followed by the original matched text. user=\& in the replacement text produces user=&
Aug 18, 2016 at 18:15
&is a special character so it needs to be escaped when used in the RHS - in your case you have to run's/user=&uid./user=\&sysuserid./g'although I suspect you also need to escape the dot in the LHS to match a literal dot so you actually need's/user=&uid\./user=\&sysuserid./g'