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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T17:39:05+00:00

I have string like this: Some standard text CONST_INSIDE_QUOTES blah blah CONST There might

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I have string like this:

“Some standard text CONST_INSIDE_QUOTES” blah blah CONST “There might be another quotes”

The thing is, that i want to replace all constants in string with some text, but it mustn’t be applied on constants inside text in quotes. I have this regex:

sed “s/([A-Z][A-Z0-9_]*)([^a-z])/<span class=\”const\”>\1<\/span>\2/g”

which of course works for all consts. Any ideas how to exclude its apply on quotes constants? Unfortunately sed only…

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Ok, it’s not pretty but it works as long as you don’t have nested quotes.

    That is to say:

    blah "foo" blah "bar" OK
    "blah "foo" blah "bar" blah" NOT OK

    It uses a the double-quote as the field separator and then only works on odd-numbered fields (via the % operator) to do its substitutions. This essentially solves the balanced parentheses problem when you don’t have nested quotes.

    awk -F'"' '{
  for(i=1;i<NF;i++)
    if(i%2)
    $i=gensub(/([[:upper:]][[:upper:][:digit:]_]*)/,"<span class=\"const\">\\1</span>","g",$i)
}1' OFS='"'

    Proof of Concept

    $ echo 'read(3, "ogpid=30589 0 0\nFIK/XBRADA08.STU"..., 1024); blah blah C3434ONST "some other text"'  | awk -F'"' '{for(i=1;i<NF;i++)if(i%2)$i=gensub(/([[:upper:]][[:upper:][:digit:]_]*)/,"<span class=\"const\">\\1</span>","g",$i)}1' OFS='"'
read(3, "ogpid=30589 0 0\nFIK/XBRADA08.STU"..., 1024); blah blah <span class="const">C3434ONST</span> "some other text"
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