Question

I have a sed command that I want to run on a huge, terrible, ugly HTML file that was created from a Microsoft Word document. All it should do is remove any instance of the string

style='text-align:center; color:blue;
exampleStyle:exampleValue'

The sed command that I am trying to modify is

sed "s/ style='[^']*'//" fileA > fileB

It works great, except that whenever there is a new line inside of the matching text, it doesn’t match. Is there a modifier for sed, or something I can do to force matching of any character, including newlines?

I understand that regexps are terrible at XML and HTML, blah blah blah, but in this case, the string patterns are well-formed in that the style attributes always start with a single quote and end with a single quote. So if I could just solve the newline problem, I could cut down the size of the HTML by over 50% with just that one command.

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In the end, it turned out that Sinan Ünür’s perl script worked best. It was almost instantaneous, and it reduced the file size from 2.3 MB to 850k. Good ol’ Perl…

Answer 1

sed goes over the input file line by line which means, as I understand, what you want is not possible in sed.

You could use the following Perl script (untested), though:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

{
    local $/; # slurp mode
    my $html = <>;
    $html =~ s/ style='[^']*'//g;
    print $html;
}

__END__

A one liner would be:

$ perl -e 'local $/; $_ = <>; s/ style=\047[^\047]*\047//g; print' fileA > fileB