Question

I have a document containing many quotation marks. I need to replace all pairs of " with \quotation{ (beginning) and } (ending), for use in ConTeXt, e.g.:

"Do not be afraid," said the tiger, "I am a vegetarian."

This should become:

\quotation{Do not be afraid,} said the tiger, \quotation{I am a vegetarian.}

• There are no nested quotes in the document.
• The replacement should only appear when the quotation marks are found in pairs. If a line has an odd number of quotation marks, then changes should not made made to that line, as that is an indication that there is an error.
• If the character “/” appears between the start and ending quote, then the changes should mode be made to that line, as that is another indication of an error.
• Each paragraph appears on a single line, so the code should process the document one line at a time.

How can I replace these quotation marks with the format used by ConTeXt?

Answer 1

Not perfect, but you can try something like this –

sed 's/"\(.[^"]*\)"/\\quotation{\1}/g' file

Test:

[jaypal:~/Temp] cat file
"Do not be afraid," said the tiger, "I am a vegetarian."

[jaypal:~/Temp] sed 's/"\(.[^"]*\)"/\\quotation{\1}/g' file
\quotation{Do not be afraid,} said the tiger, \quotation{I am a vegetarian.}