how to replace a character within in a multiple double quoted words within a line using sed?

Question

I have text file including text format like this.

012345,"[ThinkPadT2/3Gband,Mac]",Lenovo,"iPhone3G,A1241"

How do i replace comma inside words only within double quote by pipe(|) operator using sed. I need output like this :

012345,"[ThinkPadT2/3Gband | Mac]",Lenovo,"iPhone3G|A1241"

Answer 1

This is standard procedure to make sed non-greedy and back-reference tip for substring(s) in brackets ()

sed 's/\(\"[^",]\{1,\}\),\([^",]\{1,\}\"\)/\1 | \2/g'

Or for GNU sed

sed -r 's/("[^",]+),([^",]+")/\1 | \2/g'

Answer 2

You could try something like this:

$ cat filename
012345,"[ThinkPadT2/3Gband,Mac]",Lenovo,"iPhone3G,A1241"

$ cat filename | sed -E 's:([A-Z,a-z]),([A-Z,a-z]):\1|\2:g'
012345,"[ThinkPadT2/3Gband|Mac]",Lenovo,"iPhone3G|A1241"

Answer 3

Sed is not the right tool for this. I think it may require some advanced features to achieve like the above. Here is the perl on-liner which replaces any number of double commas present within double quotes with <space>|<space> .

$ echo '012345,"[ThinkPadT2/3Gband,Mac,Apple]",Lenovo,"iPhone3G,A1241"' | perl -pe 's/,(?!(?:"[^"]*"|[^"])*$)/ | /g'
012345,"[ThinkPadT2/3Gband | Mac | Apple]",Lenovo,"iPhone3G | A1241"