Re: Suggest new fixed flag for s command?

FWIW in every language that I know of that implements this feature it's
implemented as [raw strings] with an 'r' (sometimes 'R') flag. "Raw regular
expression" doesn't really make sense, but the term and flag will be
recognized by programmers.

I, too, have occasionally wanted this.

[raw strings] https://www.google.com/search?q=raw+string

brandon



On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 2:48 AM, Pedro Izecksohn <[email protected]> wrote:

>   The character f may mean fixed, but it also may mean flag. I thought
> about a command that would clear the state of the substitution flag, but as
> I'm minimalist ... I'm against any new command that is not strictly
> necessary, where necessary means not replaceable. Why? Every new command
> makes the switch loop longer, IOW: makes sed run slower.
>
>   A much more useful command would: Take the hold space and compile it as
> a regular expression; to be used by the next empty regular expression, that
> is // . The character for such command: I'd use C ompile.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Thierry Blanc <Thierry.Blanc@...>
> > To: Daniel <dagoldman@...>
> > Cc: [email protected]
> > Sent: Wednesday, May 8, 2013 3:20 PM
> > Subject: Re: Suggest new fixed flag for s command?
> >
> > very good idea.
> >
> > to not escape strings by hand, you can use preprocessing, something like:
> >
> > echo 'jj*hh.?' | sed 's|[.?*]|\\&|g'
> >
> > On 05/08/2013 11:27 AM, Daniel wrote:
> >>  I have run into a situation sometimes where literal strings I want to
> > replace that have metacharacters, and I want to replace it with some
> other
> > similarly odd string.
> >>
> >>  For example, suppose I want to replace the literal string "jj*hh"
> > with the literal string "foo\1bar".
> >>
> >>  To make it work, I would have to use escape characters:
> >>
> >>  $ echo 'jj*hh' | sed 's/jj\*hh/foo\\1bar/'
> >>  foo\1bar
> >>
> >>  I don't mind doing this for one or two strings, but sometimes I have a
> > lot of strings, and don't want to escape them all by hand or write some
> > complex script procedure.
> >>
> >>  What if the s command could have a f "fixed" flag, similar to the
> > grep -F fixed flag, so the following would work:
> >>
> >>  $ echo 'jj*hh' | sed 's/jj*hh/foo\1bar/f'
> >>  foo\1bar
> >>
> >>  The f flag would tell s to ignore all metacharacters, to just
> interpret A
> > and B in s/A/B/f as fixed strings.
> >>
> >>  Maybe there is some simpler way to do this I am overlooking? Anyway,
> just a
> > suggestion.
> >>
>
>
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