Question

I’m making replacments in PHP file and I need to change the language variable with sed. Here my WORKING code:

sed -i '' -e "s/\$config\['language'\]  = \"english\";/\$config['language'] = '$LANGUAGE';/" Sources/$APP/application/config/config.php

This is not working to match any language set:

sed -i '' -e "s/\$config\['language'\]  = \"*\";/\$config['language'] = '$LANGUAGE';/" Sources/$APP/application/config/config.php

What’s wrong?

Answer 1

In sed, the asterisk (*) character denotes “repeat the previous thing 0 or more times.” This is in contrast to a shell, where it expands to anything. What you want to do is shove a . (which means “anything”), right before the asterisk, like so:

sed -i '' -e "s/\$config\['language'\]  = \".*\";/\$config['language'] = '$LANGUAGE';/" Sources/$APP/application/config/config.php

That will then tell your program “repeat any character (.) any number of times (*)”.