Question

I’m looking for a way to replace all instances of a form:

model->variable

with

models[variable][index]

where variable can be pretty much any combination of letters and numbers, probably defined like [0-9a-Z]{4,12}.
There are hundreds of such variables in the text. I need to know exact form of found string “variable” to use it in replacement. Is there a way to “remember” the string and use it later? Or any other method / software which could help in such case?

Thanks in advance.

If you could convert “variable” to uppercase by the way, it would be awesome.

Answer 1

You can use things in the pattern to replace with if you enclose it in \(...\). You then use \1 to insert the thing that was captured by the first such bracket.

A naïve solution to your problem would be this:

sed 's/model->\(.*\)/models[\1][index]/' file.txt