Question

I am trying to write a sed script to convert LaTeX coded tables into tab delimited tables.

To do this I need to convert & into \t and strip out anything that is preceded by \.

This is what I have so far:

s/&/\t/g
s/\*/" "/g

The first line works as intended. In the second line I try to replace \ followed by anything with a space but it doesn’t alter the lines with \ in them.

Any suggestions are appreciated. Also, can you briefly explain what suggested scripts “say”? I am new to sed and that really helps with the learning process!

Thanks

Answer 1

Assuming you’re running this as a sed script, and not directly on the command line:

s/\\.*/ /g

Explanation:

\\ – double backslash to match a literal backslash (a single \ is interpreted as “escape the following character”, followed by a .* (. – match any single character, * – arbitrarily many times).