Question

I’m trying to find replace the following

<a href=\"test\">

with

<a href="test">

using sed.

I understand that both the \ and the " need to be escaped, so I do the following:

sed -i "s|a href=\\\"test\\\"|a href=\"test\"|g"

but this doesn’t seem to work. Any idea what I’m doing wrong?

Answer 1

Just use single quotes instead of doubles.

$ echo '<a href=\"test\">' | sed "s|a href=\\\"test\\\"|a href=\"test\"|g"
<a href=\"test\">

$ echo '<a href=\"test\">' | sed 's|a href=\\\"test\\\"|a href=\"test\"|g'
<a href="test">

Ori, if you can’t use single quotes, just add even more escapes 🙂

$ echo '<a href=\"test\">' | sed "s|a href=\\\\\"test\\\\\"|a href=\"test\"|g"
<a href="test">