Re: Escaping of line breaks for text replacement

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From	jt@toerring.de (Jens Thoms Toerring)
Newsgroups	comp.unix.programmer, comp.programming
Subject	Re: Escaping of line breaks for text replacement
Date	2 Mar 2014 15:49:52 GMT
Organization	Freie Universitaet Berlin
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Cross-posted to 2 groups.

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In comp.unix.programmer Markus Elfring <Markus.Elfring@web.de> wrote:
> Hello,

> I get the following result if I try out such a command on my openSUSE system.

> elfring@Sonne:~> $SHELL --version && sed --version && LINE='echo ---' && $LINE \
> && DRAFT='template1.txt' && cat $DRAFT && $LINE \
> && INPUT='replacement1.txt' && cat $INPUT && XY=$(< $INPUT) && $LINE \
> && LANG=C sed "s/# placeholder/$XY/" $DRAFT
> GNU bash, Version 4.2.45(1)-release (x86_64-suse-linux-gnu)
>    ...
> sed (GNU sed) 4.2.2
>    ...
> ---
> +++++++++++++
> # placeholder
> *************
> ---
> ABC
> XYZ
> ---
> sed: -e expression #1, char 19: unterminated `s' command


> I guess that the shown error message is an indication that I should add a
> bit of escaping to the content of the variable "XY" which I inserted
> previously. I have tried to achieve this with shell pattern substitution.

Yes the problem is the linefeed in the replacement you pass to sed
in the end. You need to reolace the linefeeds read from the "re-
placements1.txt" file by '\\n' for sed to start to like them. One
way to do it would be e.g.

$SHELL --version && sed --version && LINE='echo ---' && $LINE &&
DRAFT='template1.txt' && cat $DRAFT && $LINE && INPUT='replacement1.txt' &&
cat $INPUT && XY=`sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/\\\n/g' $INPUT` && $LINE && LANG=C sed
"s/# placeholder/$XY/" $DRAFT

With

XY=`sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/\\\n/g' $INPUT`

you set XY to the files contents with linefeeds replaced by
'\\n' which is then acceptable to sed.

                               Regards, Jens
-- 
  \   Jens Thoms Toerring  ___      jt@toerring.de
   \__________________________      http://toerring.de

Thread

Escaping of line breaks for text replacement Markus Elfring <Markus.Elfring@web.de> - 2014-03-02 14:00 +0100
  Re: Escaping of line breaks for text replacement jt@toerring.de (Jens Thoms Toerring) - 2014-03-02 15:49 +0000
  Re: Escaping of line breaks for text replacement dave.gma+news002@googlemail.com.invalid (Dave Sines) - 2014-03-02 16:52 +0000
  Re: Escaping of line breaks for text replacement Kaz Kylheku <kaz@kylheku.com> - 2014-03-02 18:11 +0000
  Re: Escaping of line breaks for text replacement Siri Cruz <chine.bleu@yahoo.com> - 2014-03-07 02:47 -0800

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