Question

I am trying to use sed to substitute a string taking into account an whitespace.
Example:

Hello          World

to be replaced by

Hello George  

I tried:

sed -e 's/Hello[:space]+World/Hello George/' ./infile > outFile

but it does not work.

How can I fix this?

Answer 1

sed -e 's/Hello[[:space:]]\+World/Hello George/' ./infile > outFile

or

sed -e 's/Hello \+World/Hello George/' ./infile > outFile

Note: In OSX, you’ll need

sed -E 's/Hello +World/Hello George/' ./infile > outFile