my sed expression does not work

Question

I want to use sed to comment out a certain command in a js file. The command is called processLoad(..). I came up with expression below but it doesn't do what I expect it to do. The computer that I am on belongs to my provider, so I do not know the version of linux that is running on the machine. [added:]

sed -r -i 's_^\([ \t]+processLoad.*\)$_//\1_' test.txt

I hope to replace a line:

     processLoad('mystr');

into

//     processLoad('mystr')

I figured out that '/' as substitute separation character would pose problems with the // as comments, so I choose _ as substitute separation character.

Answer 1

Try sed '/^[[:space:]]*processLoad/s!^!//!'

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The first part /^[[:space:]]*processLoad/ limits actions to only lines matching that pattern. The second part s!^!//! is sed's famous search-and-replace: Find the beginning of the line (^) and replace with two slashes. I use bangs (s!!!) instead of the typical slashes so I don't have to bother escaping the literal slashes in the replacement string. For more details, see the sed man page.

Answer 2

Perhaps you should change the + to * in case processLoad occurs at the start of a line.

If processLoad(...) can occur in the middle of a line you'd need a rather different expression.

Answer 3

Do you need the extended regexp flag (-r)?

With this flag, your regexp is trying to match literal ( and ) rather than store the match.

The only difference between basic and extended regular expressions is in the behavior of a few characters: ‘?’, ‘+’, parentheses, and braces (‘{}’). While basic regular expressions require these to be escaped if you want them to behave as special characters, when using extended regular expressions you must escape them if you want them to match a literal character.

Extended regexps link

Answer 4

Expression below solved it, for me it works on debian linux, and mac os x (bsd), although the \1 needs to be substituted with $1. Kind of irritating that sed differs so much across different platforms.

`sed -e 's_^\([ \t]*processLoad(\)_//\1_' -i -- test.txt