Question

Given this file, I’m trying to do a super primitive sed or perl replacement of a footer.

Typically I use DOM to parse HTML files but so far I’ve had no issues due to the primitive HTML files I’m dealing with ( time matters ) using sed/perl.

All I need is to replace the <div id="footer"> which contains whitespace, an element that has another element, and the closing </div> with <?php include 'footer.php';?>.

For some reason I can’t even get this pattern to match up until the <div id="stupid">. I know there are whitespace characters so i used \s*:

perl -pe 's|<div id="footer">.*\s*.*\s*|<?php include INC_PATH . 'includes/footer.php'; ?>|' file.html | less

But that only matches the first line. The replacement looks like this:

<?php include INC_PATH . includes/footer.php; ?> 
                   <div id="stupid"><img src="file.gif" width="206" height="252"></div>

               </div>

Am I forgetting something simple, or should I specify some sort of flag to deal with a multiline match?

perl -v is 5.14.2 and I’m only using the pe flags.

Answer 1

You probably want -0777, which will force perl to read the entire file at once.

perl -0777 -n -e 's|something|else|g' file

Also, your strategy of doing .*\s*.*\s* is pretty fragile. It’ll match e.g. <div id="foo", which is just a fragment…