5

Imagine I have a file like this:

INSERT INTO table VALUES('1','<p><em>The lazy fox jumps again</em></p>bunch of other html<p><em>Is the lazy fox crazy?</em></p>')
INSERT INTO table VALUES('2','<p><em>The lazy fox jumps again</em></p>bunch of other html<p><em>Is the lazy fox crazy?</em></p>')
INSERT INTO table VALUES('3','<p><em>The lazy fox jumps again</em></p>bunch of other html<p><em>Is the lazy fox crazy?</em></p>')

And I wish to delete only the first occurrence of <p><em> and </em></p> so I end up with something like this:

INSERT INTO table VALUES('1','The lazy fox jumps againbunch of other html<p><em>Is the lazy fox crazy?</em></p>')
INSERT INTO table VALUES('2','The lazy fox jumps againbunch of other html<p><em>Is the lazy fox crazy?</em></p>')
INSERT INTO table VALUES('3','The lazy fox jumps againbunch of other html<p><em>Is the lazy fox crazy?</em></p>')

... how can I do that with sed (or perl)? The statement...:

sed "1,/INSERT INTO/s/<p><em>//g"

... only replaces the first occurrence in the file, not on every line.

Help is much appreciated.

2 Answers 2

4

If you want to process all lines with INSERT INTO, do not provide address range. If you want to only replace the first occurence of a string, do not provide /g:

sed -e '/INSERT INTO/s/<p><em>//' -e '/INSERT INTO/s/<\/em><\/p>//' 
1
  • I edited your answer to include the second substitution the OP asked or. Hope you don't mind.
    – terdon
    Sep 17, 2012 at 10:45
0

Here's one way you could do it with perl:

perl -pe 's:<p><em>(.*?)</em></p>:$1:' infile

The .*? quantifier is non-greedy, so only the first pair of tags will be matched.

Output:

INSERT INTO table VALUES('1','The lazy fox jumps againbunch of other html<p><em>Is the lazy fox crazy?</em></p>')
INSERT INTO table VALUES('2','The lazy fox jumps againbunch of other html<p><em>Is the lazy fox crazy?</em></p>')
INSERT INTO table VALUES('3','The lazy fox jumps againbunch of other html<p><em>Is the lazy fox crazy?</em></p>')

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