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From: maart@cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: Re: sed 's/foobar/$string/g'.... can't do this?
Message-ID: <8872@star.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 29 Jan 91 15:23:49 GMT
References: <1991Jan17.003856.469@unicorn.cc.wwu.edu> <135@edi386.UUCP> <1991Jan21.124531.27867@siesoft.co.uk> <7ejp01gY0c.900@amdahl.uts.a <1064@mwtech.UUCP> <2586@root44.co.uk>
Sender: news@cs.vu.nl
Reply-To: maart@cs.vu.nl (Maarten Litmaath)
Distribution: comp
Organization: VU Dept. of Computer Science, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Lines: 32

In article <2586@root44.co.uk>,
	gwc@root.co.uk (Geoff Clare) writes:
)In <1064@mwtech.UUCP> martin@mwtech.UUCP (Martin Weitzel) writes:
)
)>	sed 's/foobar/'"$string"'/g'
)
)>BTW: There's no simple way to stop sed from complaining when the variable
)>`string' contains a slash, except if you know that it does contain a slash
)>and use some other seperator in the s-commando.
)
)Yes there is.  Simply create a copy of $string with '/' changed to '\/'.
)While you're at it, you can treat '&' and '\' the same way to prevent
)sed from interpreting '&', '\1', etc. if they happen to occur in $string.
)
)Xstring=`sed 's/[\/&\\]/\\&/g' <<!
)$string
)!
)`
)sed 's/foobar/'"$Xstring"'/g'

Did you actually try your solution?  I guess not.
The following works:

Xstring=`sed 's/[\/&\\\\]/\\\\&/g' <<!
$string
!
`
--
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