Question

Current text

Variable length text = some string(some more text

Change to

Variable length text = some string(addition some more text

Need to add a certain text after first parenthesis in a line only after “=” character is encountered. Another condition is to ignore patterns like “= (“, which essentially means you should ignore patterns with only space between “=” and “(“

My Try:

sed -e "s#*=(\w\()#\1(addition#g"

Thanks in anticipation!

Answer 1

Tweak this for your needs:

$ echo 'Variable length text = some string(some more text' |\
sed 's/^[^=]*=[^(]*[[:alnum:]][^(]*(/&addition /'

That matches for:

1. Beginning of the string
2. Anything but = any number of times
3. =
4. Anything but ( any number of times
5. An alpha-numeric character
6. Anything but ( any number of times
7. (

… and substitutes it with the matched string adding ' addition' to it.
The output is

Variable length text = some string(addition some more text