Question

I need a bash script that prints the first letter of a name. Example: Ruben Van Den Bosshe becomes RVDB or Ken Van de Wilde becomes KVdW

I want to use the sed command.

Answer 1

There’s probably a neater way of doing this, but the following seems to work:

$ echo 'Ken Van de Wilde' | sed 's/\(\w\)\w*\( \|$\)/\1/g'
KVdW
$ echo 'Ruben Van Den Bosshe' | sed 's/\(\w\)\w*\( \|$\)/\1/g'
RVDB

To break down that regular expression a bit, it matches the following in turn:

• A letter of a word, captured in the first group: \(\w\)
• Zero or more letters of words: \w*
• And finally, either a space or the end of the line: \( \|$\)

That sequence is replaced with whatever was captured in the first group: \1