Question

I need to replace a particular character in a text file with another character. For example, replacing “E” with “A”:

Apple ice → ApplA Ica

While executing sed 's/E/A' < apple.txt > app.txt I receive the error

function cannot be parsed

Please help! I need to automate this using Antscript.

Answer 1

Since you are in Ant environment, you probably don’t need to execute sed at all, but rather use Copy task with filter, or ReplaceRegExp task.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project>
    <replaceregexp file="apple.txt" flags="g" match="e" replace="A"/>
</project>

This alters the file in place:

$ cat apple.txt
Apple ice
$
$ ant
Buildfile: build.xml

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 0 seconds
$
$ cat apple.txt
ApplA icA

Your example is strange with case (a|A, e|E). I’ll assume that’s typo.

Follow up: To declare encoding…

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<project>
    <replaceregexp file="apple.txt" encoding="utf-8" flags="g" match="Á" replace=" "/>
</project>

I tested this successfully. Before:

ApplA icA
ApplÁs icÁs

After:

ApplA icA
Appl s ic s