Hello,
I need to use sed to replace a word in file.
My command is this:
sed "s/word_to_replace/'"${INPUT}"'/1 filename

and because INPUT="~@#$%^&*()-_=+{}[]\|;:<>,./?"
and / is also the delimiter so I'm keep on getting error message
sed: command garbled: ...

any suggestions about how I might solve it?

THANK YOU VERY MUCH

That is a very odd replacement string...

It has every usable delimiter that sed will recognize. You can escape the / in the replacment string like this \/

However, I can not change what's in the string, because the string comes from a line in a file. and I cannot predict wat's in the file.
Other ideas?

thank you

sed -e "sQword_to_replaceQ${INPUT}Q" -e "s/\(\^\)word_to_replace\(\*\)/\1\2/"

after use it, I got a error message say:
syntax error near unexpected token '-_=+{}[]\|'
I couldn't find what I did wrong.

String is "~@#$%^&*()-_=+{}[]\|;:<>,./?"

Thank you, it works great except it's giving me "~@#$%^&*()-_=+{}[]|;:<>,./?" instead of "~@#$%^&*()-_=+{}[]\|;:<>,./?" so \ is missing
do you have idea wat a better command might be?

THANK YOU

Which platform are you running this on? I tried it on AIX and it runs w/o a hiccup...does not lose the backslash character.