I am cleaning up HTML with sed. With the regexp

<a name="[A-Za-z0-9 ?_.]+"></a><h[123]>[ ]*<span class="mw-headline" >[A-Za-z0-9 ?_.]+</span></h[123]>

I can find the tags I need. But when I place them in a sed command, sed fails. So I started building up from a smaller command. This is where I am now:

sed -r -e s/"<a name=\"/replacement/ <in >out

This works. But when I enter:

sed -r -e s/"<a name=\"[A-Za-z0-9 ?_.]+"/replacement/ <in >out

it fails with:

sed: can't read <in: Invalid argument
sed: can't read >out: Invalid argument

But the in file is really there. How can I get the regexp in the sed command? I have tried escaping/not escaping chars, but sed does not seem to accept it.

Can you provide the ouput you desire?

Regards

From a tag like this:

<a name="Introduction"></a><h1><span class="mw-headline" >Introduction</span></h1>

I'd like to make:

<a name="Introduction"></a><h1><span class="mw-headline" id="Introduction" >Introduction</span></h1>

Therefore I do the following replacement:

Match:
<a name="([A-Za-z0-9 ?_.]+)"></a><h([123])>[^mw]*mw-headline" >([A-Za-z0-9 ?_.]+)</span></h[123]>

And replace it with:

<a name="\1"></a><h\2><span class="mw-headline" id="\1" >\3</span></h\2>

This works when using a find and replace editor which accepts regex. But I can't seem to fit it in one sed command.

Something like:

echo '<a name="Introduction"></a><h1><span class="mw-headline" >Introduction</span></h1>'|
sed 's/\(.*"\)\(.*\)/\1 id="Introduction" \2/'