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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T09:43:23+00:00

I’d like to insert the line <hr /> above every occurrence of a header

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I’d like to insert the line

<hr />

above every occurrence of a header 2 line in a file – e.g., above this pattern

<h2>variable pattern here</h2>

So the above should become

<hr />
<h2>variable pattern here</h2>

How can I do this with Vim, Sed or Perl?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    With sed you could do sed '/<h2>/i <hr />':

    $ cat file
<html>
<h2>variable pattern here</h2>
<h3>not here</h3>
<h2>heading</h2>
<h2>Something</h2>

$ sed '/<h2>/i <hr />' file
<html>
<hr />
<h2>variable pattern here</h2>
<h3>not here</h3>
<hr />
<h2>heading</h2>
<hr />
<h2>Something</h2>

    The first part /<h2>/ matches line containing <h2> and the second part uses the i command to insert <hr /> above the matched line.

    A nice option with sed is -i this save the changes back to the file instead of printing to stdout but be sure that the changes are correct first. 

    sed -i '/<h2>/i <hr />' file
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