I have lots of text in a file. I want to delete all text that are between symbols === and <!!!>. E.g.
Text ===some comments<!!!> lala ===aaa<!!!>" should be Text lala after running the command. I tried sed -i -E "s/(===(.*)<!!!>)//" file, but it doesn't work.
Edit:
Text ===
some commenkjghkb
ufjhbgdfxjhg
srtdfts
</!!!>
lala ===aaa
</!!!>"```
should be Text lala
With perl regular expressions, you can do non-greedy matches:
perl -pe 's/===.*?<!!!>//g' file
Edit 1: If you want to insert some text use that:
perl -pe 's/===.*?<!!!>/Text you want to insert/g' file
Edit 2: If it has to handle multiline comments as well use that:
perl -pe 'BEGIN{undef $/;} s|===.*?</!!!>|insert|gs' file
We have to use the s modifier, which brings . to match also a newline. The $/ variable of perl, which is the input separator, must be changed to undef. This is also called the "slurp" mode.
===abc instead of ===, and </!!!>?
perl -pe 's/===abs.*?<\/!!!>//g' file doesn't seem to work
=== there is no string abs... What do you want to achieve?
With sed which doesn't support non-greedy *, you'd need to use tricks like:
sed 's/_/_u/g;s/|/_p/g;s/<!!!>/|/g
s/===[^|]*|//g
s/|/<!!!>/g;s/_p/|/g;s/_u/_/g'
Or with some sed implementations:
sed 's/<!!!>/\
/g; s/===[^\n]*\n//g; s/\n/<!!!>/g'
To support multi-line matching (as per your edit), with recent versions of GNU sed, you can use the first one with -z option (assuming the file doesn't contain NUL characters) or use something like:
sed ':1
$!{
N
b1
}
s/_/_u/g;s/|/_p/g;s/<!!!>/|/g
s/===[^|]*|//g
s/|/<!!!>/g;s/_p/|/g;s/_u/_/g'
<!!!>in one and</!!!in the other. Make up your mind. Also do you mean that those spaces, newlines and"```have to be removed?