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up vote 6 down vote favorite

In using sed, I often create rather complicated and intricate regexes that I need to match twice in a file. Is there a way for me to save this regex and just reference it twice?

Maybe something that looks like this?

sed ' complicated_regex=/^(([a-f0-9]{32})+([a-zA-Z0-9=]{{$i}})?)+$/
s/complicated_regex:complicated_regex/simple-output/
' my_file

Update: An answer has presented the solution of using a bash variable. This doesn't work. Given a test.txt.

#test.txt
foo bar
bar foo

And the script

#!/bin/bash

VALUE='foo \([a-z]\+\)'

sed 's/"${VALUE}"/foo happy \1/' test.txt

This should produce the output

foo happy bar
bar foo

But instead I get the error

sed: -e expression #1, char 24: invalid reference \1 on `s' command's RHS
share|improve this question
    
If you use Perl, you can reference previous parts of the expression within the expression: perl -pe 's/^(([a-f0-9]{32})+([a-zA-Z0-9=]{{$i}})?)+:\1$/simple_output/' my_file –  glenn jackman Sep 21 '11 at 20:10
1  
When you find something too complicated for sed, don't hesitate to go for awk or perl. –  Gilles Sep 21 '11 at 23:32
1  
@Cory: Your example works fine, if you get its syntax right. You have the "$variable" still enclosed in 'single-quotes' which hides it from the shell expansion you expect... it should be sed 's/'"${VALUE}"'/foo happy \1/' test.txt –  Peter.O Sep 22 '11 at 4:32

1 Answer 1

up vote 5 down vote accepted

You can use shell variables:

complicated_regex='(([a-f0-9]{32})+([a-zA-Z0-9=]{{$i}})?)+'
sed s/^"$complicated_regex":"$complicated_regex"\$/'simple-output'/ my_file

I'm not sure about what you meant by $i, but you might need to put it outside single quotes:

complicated_regex='(([a-f0-9]{32})+([a-zA-Z0-9=]{{'"$i"'}})?)+'
share|improve this answer
    
Of course this works only if the sed command is invoked from the shell, but there is a similar solution with almost all programming languages. (And I don't think it's possible to use variables within sed.) –  Stéphane Gimenez Sep 21 '11 at 18:59
    
Hrm. Trying this, backreferences appear to be broken. s/$complicated_regex/\1/ gives an error saying that is an invalid reference. –  Cory Klein Sep 21 '11 at 19:30
    
Ah, maybe my fault, I'm used to zsh variable substitutions. See updated answer. –  Stéphane Gimenez Sep 21 '11 at 19:37
    
You'll have to remove the anchors from the variable and put them in the sed script: sed "s/^${complicated_regex}:${complicated_regex}\$/simple-output/" my_file –  glenn jackman Sep 21 '11 at 20:09
    
Duh! Yes, I forgot to check that I was provided a valid regex concatenation :-) –  Stéphane Gimenez Sep 21 '11 at 20:13

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