Question

here is my question , im using ubuntu , and im trying to replaces text in a xml file .. from a txt that i have all changes that i made ,an example

in replace.txt file i have this

    nameofsearch  | nameforreplace
    nameofsearch1 | nameforreplace1 
    nameofsearch2 | nameforreplace2 

this is the format that the software uses for search and replace

and on the xml file, i have the nameofsearch

this was done by a soft made on .net, that i can’t run on linux , so this is my question , how can i do that , using bash , or any other thing like that.

thanks , sebastian.

Answer 1

The tool you are looking for is sed. If you want to replace str1 with str2 in file1 and save the result in file2, run:

sed s/str1/str2 < file1 > file2

You need to escape some special characters because sed parses the str1 as a regular expression.

In your case, two steps are needed. The first step transforms your replace.txt into a sed script file witch I call replace.sed.

sed "s/\s*|\s*/\//g"  "replace.txt" | sed "s/\w*\/\w*/s\/&\/g/" > replace.sed

The first sed call transforms your pipes (and surrounding whitespaces) into slashes |->/. The second call surrounds your search/replace strings with sed syntax. replace.sed should look like

s/nameofsearch/nameforreplace/
s/nameofsearch1/nameforreplace1/
s/nameofsearch2/nameforreplace2/

The second step is to execute sed with the given script file on your xml file.

sed -f replace.sed test.xml > replaced.xml