Question

I have a plaintext file containing multiple instances of the pattern $$DATABASE_*$$ and the asterisk could be any string of characters. I’d like to replace the entire instance with whatever is in the asterisk portion, but lowercase.

Here is a test file:

$$DATABASE_GIBSON$$

test me $$DATABASE_GIBSON$$ test me

$$DATABASE_GIBSON$$ test $$DATABASE_GIBSON$$ test

$$DATABASE_GIBSON$$ $$DATABASE_GIBSON$$$$DATABASE_GIBSON$$

Here is the desired output:

gibson

test me gibson test me

gibson test gibson test

gibson gibsongibson

How do I do this with sed/awk/tr/perl?

Answer 1

Here’s the perl version I ended up using.

perl -p -i.bak -e 's/\$\$DATABASE_(.*?)\$\$/lc($1)/eg' inputFile