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I have a file with
<vcell i="2" v="2" s="0" m="0"/>
<cell i="3" v="3187"/>
<cell i="4" v="1"/>
<cell i="5" v="17"/>
<cell i="6" v="0"/>
<cell i="7" v="2"/>
<cell i="8" v="17"/>
<cell i="9" v="0 / 13"/>
I need to replace in
<vcelli2 v="2" s="0" m="0"/>
<celli3 v="3187"/>
<celli4 v="1"/>
<celli5 v="17"/>
<celli6 v="0"/>
<celli7 v="2"/>
<celli8 v="17"/>
<celli9 v="0 / 13"/>
I can do this with a sed and regular expression?
Yes, it can be done with a sed command.
Remember to backup the file before making any changes to it. The backup can be removed after confirming that the results are correct or kept for later.
As for the sed command, something like
sed -i.backup -E 's/ i="([0-9]*)"/i\1/g' file
should work (note that this will automatically make a backup of the original file, remove the backup part if done manually).
The -i flag (not available in all flavours of sed) stands for in-place (i.e. save back to the original file; keep copy of original with extension .backup) and -E (extended regex) is used to avoid escaping the parentheses.
-i that works in all seds. The alternative that you propose will leave an additional file in the directory. The only truly portable solution for a no additional file left is a two step tango: sed -E 's/ i="([0-9]*)"/i\1/g' file >newfile; mv newfile file @Philippos
sed ... && mv ... over the semicolon version to avoid overwriting my source with an empty file in case of an error.
Oct 15, 2019 at 19:26
-i receiving an empty value). @Philippos
cp original backup), do all modifications to a second file (sed '…' original > result), and, then, after all heavy processing has been done, do cat result > original and rm result. That way you get to keep a backup, the result file keeps the symbolic links (if any), permissions and inode number of the original. But that has the cost of (short lived) additional disk space. That shouldn't be an important issue in most cases. @Philippos