sed to replace all occurrences of a left zero padded number having an embedded minus sign “-“ so that the minus sign is on the Left

Question

I have a tab delimited input file. Some numeric field values have a minus sign in the midst of the value such as 000-45.123. I need the - to be on left side like this instead: -00045.123

So if tab delimited input file contains: (spaces are tabs)

ABC 000-45.123 0-765.43 DEF 00-54 XYZ

then I want result to be

ABC -00045.123 -0765.43 DEF -0054 XYZ

All the number values with an embedded “-“ begin with 1 or more zeros and no other characters.

Note: I don't have these options available: sed -r or sed -E

Answer 1

With GNU sed:

Change order from number and minus to minus and number.

sed -r 's/([0-9]+)(-)/\2\1/g' file

Output:

ABC     -00045.123      -0765.43        DEF     -0054   XYZ

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See: The Stack Overflow Regular Expressions FAQ

Answer 2

POSIXly:

TAB=$(printf '\t')
sed "s/^\(00*\)-/-\1/;s/${TAB}\(00*\)-/$TAB-\1/g"

We need to consider the two cases of the first field (00- at the start of the line) or the other fields (00- following a TAB).

With sed implementations supporting -E (for extended regular expressions) and shells supporting $'...' (both of which are likely to make it into a future version of the POSIX specification), you can simplify it to:

sed -E $'s/(^|\t)(0+)-/\1-\2/g'

instead.