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Dear Stack Exchange Community,

I see other solutions for this but I'm struggling with the regex I need to adapt them to my situation.

I have software-generated files that have lib object member properties with names that I need to replace. I need to use sed to find whatever name of the property, and replace it with the base file name.

Starting with a .js file named bobby.js that contains:

// stage content:
(lib.Scenario2IntroFigure0 = function(mode,startPosition,loop) {
    stuff
}

Ending with the same bobby.js file but it now has:

// stage content:
(lib.bobby = function(mode,startPosition,loop) {
    stuff
}

NOTE: Scenario2IntroFigure0 is different for every file, unfortunately.

Pseudocode describing what I think I should do:

A. Isolate the old name by looking for whatever is between this pattern::

// stage content:
(lib.

B. And this ending pattern:

= function(mode,startPosition,loop) {

C. Get the file base name itself with: 

FILENAME=$(basename $1 '.js')

D. Replace old name with file base name and overwrite the file like: 

sed -i "s/Scenario2IntroFigure0/$DA_FILE/g" $1

BUT where "Scenario2IntroFigure0" is whatever sed found between those two patterns.

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
0

Replace $file with your $1:

file="bobby.js"
filename=$(basename "$file" '.js')
sed -i 's/\((lib\.\).*\( = function(mode,startPosition,loop) {\)/\1'"$filename"'\2/' "$file"
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  • Thank you very much Freddy. I apologize for the delay in accepting this solution.
    – mishawagon
    Jul 1, 2019 at 15:25
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With GNU awk for gensub():

$ awk -v RS= '{ $0=gensub(/(.*\/\/\s+stage content:\s+\(lib\.)\S+(\s+=\s+function\(mode,startPosition,loop\)\s+\{.*)/,"\\1" gensub(/\.js$/,"",1,FILENAME) "\\2",1) } 1' bobby.js
// stage content:
(lib.bobby = function(mode,startPosition,loop) {
    stuff
}

Make it awk -i inplace -v RS=... if you want "inplace" editing.

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Kicking off from @Freddy but including OP requirement that the match is across lines. Done by replacing \n with NULL for the sed using

tr '\n' '\0'

and then switching them back after the sed.

f="bobby.js"
b=$(basename "$f" '.js')
pre="// stage content:\x00\(lib."             #pattern includes NULL (\x00)
post=" = function\(mode,startPosition,loop\)"
cat $f | tr '\n' '\0' | sed -E "s|($pre)[[:alnum:]]+($post)|\1$b\2|g" | tr '\0' '\n'

EDIT

A pure sed solution not involving any messing around with tr

f="bobby.js"
b=$(basename "$f" '.js')
pre="\/\/ stage content:"
mid="\(lib."
post=" = function\(mode,startPosition,loop\)"
sed -E "/^$pre$/{$!{ N;s|($pre\n$mid)[[:alnum:]]+($post)|\1$b\2|;ty;P;D;:y}}" $f

This solution courtesy of a close study of this post and this one. I hope your brain does not ache as much as mine after reading them, but I learned a lot in the process. All respect to the posters, including @Peter.O

We are not worthy!

post script

The original bobby.js is malformed as the opening and closing braces are not matched

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10
  • POSIX text processing utilities are only required to operate on POSIX text files and POSIX text files are comprised of POSIX text lines which by definition all end in \n so by converting the \ns to \0s you're relying on undefined behavior for the subsequent tools.
    – Ed Morton
    Jun 15, 2019 at 15:33
  • Which is why the last part of the code puts the \n back.
    – bu5hman
    Jun 15, 2019 at 15:39
  • That's too late though as you've already tried to process it with sed and tr by then so if, for example, you're running a version either of those that internally store their input as C strings then they'll truncate the input at the first \0s or otherwise misbehave and still be POSIX compliant.
    – Ed Morton
    Jun 15, 2019 at 16:10
  • You've lost me.... I am no POSIX expert, if you want to educate me in chat then I am game. Always keen to be educated. As I see it I am just creating a single stream of text characters (just one line) from the original file to process in sed and then reverting back. I will read up on POSIX and see if I can catch your drift.
    – bu5hman
    Jun 15, 2019 at 16:19
  • We can chat if you like but it's very simple - POSIX requires text processing tools to handle lines that end in \n so when you ask a tool to handle text that doesn't end in \n then YMMV with what that does. Beyond that POSIX requires text files to not contain \0s so when you ask a tool to handle text containing \0s then YMMV. A specific example of a problem with lines that contain \0 is that many tools are written in C and in C strings are terminated by \0 so such tools simply cannot store a "line" as a string that contains \0s since the first \0 terminates the string.
    – Ed Morton
    Jun 15, 2019 at 16:29

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