sed: Search and Replace string that conforms to a specific regular expression

Question

Using sed, I am attempting to recursively search and replace a string foo that may have characters before it as well as after it.

For examples:-

"foo_

'foo_abc

I want to specifically replace foo with foobar so that my example above will become:-

"foobar_

'foobar_abc

I am not succeeding with:-

find . -name "*.py" | xargs sed -i '/*foo*/{s/foo/foobar/g}'

What should I do instead to search and replace successfully?

perreal · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-10 07:39:45Z

2

Removing the *'s should do, and you don't need the initial /foo/:

find . -name "*.py" | xargs sed -i 's/foo/foobar/g'

answered Dec 10, 2012 at 7:39

perreal

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1 Comment

O yes. you are right. I got confused because some strings are actually in .html files and I was only replacing stuff in my .py files. My bad.