Question

I’m looking to match all less than (‘<‘) or greater than (‘>’) signs in a file using sed. I only want to match the single character

My goal is to replace them with ' <' and '> ' (ensure they have white space around them so I can parse them easier) respectively.

For example, it would match:
(without space within the tags)

< p >Hey this is a paragraph.< /p >< p >And here is another.< /p >

.. and turn it into (note the spaces)

 < p > Hey this is a paragraph. < /p >  < p > And here is another. < /p > 

Here’s what my initial (wrong) guess was:

sed 's/<{1}|>{1}/ <> /' ...

It matches the whole word/line, which is not desired, and it also does not replace correctly.

Anyways, any help would be appreciated! Thanks!

Answer 1

Try two substitutions to make it easier:

sed 's/</ </g ; s/>/> /g' file