4

I want to replace a '&' with & Except the following occurance of XML special characters. 

"   "
'   '
<   &lt;
>   &gt;
&   &amp;

I tried the method mentioned in Replace specified character between two strings? and Replacing all `&` but not the one in XML entity `&amp;` with `#` with sed in a given XML tag does not seem to work for me.

Improve this question
3
  • If you have perl use it with a negative lookahead regex. If you only want to use sed it gets more complicated. Commented Feb 17, 2016 at 13:02
  • never tried perl. If you have a soln, please let me know. Commented Feb 17, 2016 at 13:35
  • 1
    This feels like it might be an XY Problem. What are you actually trying to accomplish here? Commented Feb 18, 2016 at 14:40

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

Using a perl one-liner:

perl -pe 's/&(?!(quot|apos|lt|gt|amp);)/&amp;/g'

The -p flag makes perl behave like sed (loop over STDIN lines, do things, print to STDOUT), -e tells it to read the command from argument not file.

Regular expression substitution does this:

  • match &
    • not followed by
    • quot or apos ... amp
    • semicolon
  • replace with &amp;
  • for all matches on line.

To use it like sed, e.g.

perl -pe 's/&(?!(quot|apos|lt|gt|amp);)/&amp;/g' < my-file.xml
./myscript.sh | perl -pe 's/&(?!(quot|apos|lt|gt|amp);)/&amp;/g'
Improve this answer
0

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.