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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T18:25:00+00:00

How can I search for lines beginning with a certain string in an XML

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How can I search for lines beginning with a certain string in an XML file and comment them using perl -pi -e ‘s/string/replacement/g’ /path/file? I know how to use it for basic text replacement but I don’t know how to do this.

Specifically, i want to comment out the all shadow lines:

<button function="close" state="prelight" draw_ops="close_focused_prelight"/>
<button function="close" state="pressed" draw_ops="close_focused_pressed"/>
<shadow radius="8.0" opacity="0.75" color="#abde4f" x_offset="1" y_offset="4"/>
<padding left="7" right="7" bottom="7"/>

to

<button function="close" state="prelight" draw_ops="close_focused_prelight"/>
<button function="close" state="pressed" draw_ops="close_focused_pressed"/>
<!--    <shadow radius="8.0" opacity="0.75" color="#abde4f" x_offset="1" y_offset="4"/> -->
<padding left="7" right="7" bottom="7"/>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    s/(<shadow .*?\/>)/<!-- $1 -->/

    The ? indicates a non-greedy match to capture any characters up until ‘/>’, which should match a shadow element even if it is not the only element on a line.

    I forgot that you were doing this on the command line. I just validated this with your test input.

    perl -pi -e "s/(<shadow .*?\/>)/<\!-- \$1 -->/" /tmp/t
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