Question

Using GNU sed, I need to remove parenthetical phrases like (click here ....) including the parens. The text following click here varies, but I need to remove the whole outer parentheses.

I’ve tried many variations on the following, but I can’t seem to hit the right one:

sed -e 's/\((click here.*[^)]*\)//'

EDIT Foolishly I didn’t notice that there’s often actually a linebreak in the middle of the parenthetical string, so sed probably isn’t going to work. Example:

(click here to
enter some text)

Answer 1

With perl you can run :

perl -00 -pe "s/\(click here [^)]*\)//g" inputfile > outputfile

It will read the inputfile in a string then replace all occurrences of (click here anychar but '(' ) then output all in the outputfile.