Cleanly swap all occurences of two strings using sed
If StringB
and StringA
can't appear on the same input line, then you can tell sed to perform the replacement one way, and only try the other way if there were no occurrences of the first searched string.
<file.txt sed -e 's/StringA/StringB/g' -e t -e 's/StringB/StringA/g'
In the general case, I don't think there is an easy method in sed. By the way, note that the specification is ambiguous if StringA
and StringB
can overlap. Here's a Perl solution, which replaces the leftmost occurrence of either string, and repeats.
<file.txt perl -pe 'BEGIN {%r = ("StringA" => "StringB", "StringB" => "StringA")}
s/(StringA|StringB)/$r{$1}/ge'
If you want to stick with POSIX tools, awk is the way to go. Awk doesn't have a primitive for general parametrized replacements, so you need to roll your own.
<file.txt awk '{
while (match($0, /StringA|StringB/)) {
printf "%s", substr($0, 1, RSTART-1);
$0 = substr($0, RSTART);
printf "%s", /^StringA/ ? "StringB" : "StringA";
$0 = substr($0, 1+RLENGTH)
}
print
}'
Right now, I'm doing something like
...............
The problem with this approach is that it assumes StringC doesn't occur in the file.
I think your approach is fine, you should just use something else instead of a string, something that cannot occur in a line (in the pattern space). The best candidate is the \n
ewline.
Normally, no input line in the pattern space will contain that character so, to swap all occurrences of THIS
and THAT
in a file, you could run:
sed 's/THIS/\
/g
s/THAT/THIS/g
s/\n/THAT/g' infile
or, if your sed supports \n
in the RHS too:
sed 's/THIS/\n/g;s/THAT/THIS/g;s/\n/THAT/g' infile
I think it's perfectly valid to use a "nonce" string to swap two words. If you want a more general solution you can do something like:
sed 's/_/__/g; s/you/x_x/g; s/me/you/g; s/x_x/me/g; s/__/_/g' <<<"say you say me"
That yields
say me say you
Note that you need the two additional substitution here to avoid replacing x_x
if you happen to have "x_x" strings. But even that still seems simpler than the awk
solution for me.