Question

I have a string, lets say:

<lic><ic>This is a string</ic>, welcome to my blog.</lic>

I want to use sed to get rid of the <ic> and </ic> tags, as well as the literal tags <lic> and </lic>

What is the fastest way to do this? I’m very new to sed. How would this be done in awk?
I know awk is much better for column-like text, so I feel more inclined to learn how to use sed.

Any help is always appreciated, thanks in advance!

Answer 1

sed -e 's%</\{0,1\}l\{0,1\}ic>%%g'

The \{0,1\} is the standard sed way of writing the equivalent of ? in PCRE. The regex uses % to separate bits; then looks for an < possibly followed by a slash, possibly followed by an l, followed by ic> and replaces it with nothing, globally across each line of input.

Some versions of sed allow you to specify alternative systems of regexes, but this works everywhere.