Question

I would like to use sed to replace newlines, tabs, quotes and backslashes in a text file to use it as char constant in C, but I’m lost at the start. It would be nice to maintain the newlines also in the output, adding a ‘\n’, then a double quote to close the text line, a crlf, and another double quote to reopen the line, for example:

line1

line2

would become

“line1\n”

“line2\n”

Can anybody at least point me in the right direction?
Thanks

Answer 1

Try this as a sed command file:

s/\\/\\\\/g
s/"/\\"/g
s/  /\\t/g
s/^/"/
s/$/\\n"/

NB: there’s an embedded tab in the third line, if using vi insert by pressing ^v <tab>

1. s/\\/\\\\/g – escape back slashes
2. s/"/\\"/g – escape quotes
3. s/ /\\t/g – convert tabs
4. s/^/"/ – prepend quote
5. s/$/\\n"/ – append \n and quote