Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi All,
I have a file like this,
data1,data2,[data3],[data4],data5,data6.

i want to write a shell script to replace data3 with "/example/string". which means my data file should look like this .
data1,data2,[/example/string],[data4],data5,data6.

Could you guys help me to get a sed command or any other command to perform my above task.
I tried used a sed command like "echo "s/\[/\example\/string" /g > temp
sed -f temp2 data_file> tst_one.
cat tst_one
But this gives me the output as below,
data1,data2,[/example/string],[/example/string],data5,data6.



Thanks in Advance!,
Giri.

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Hi zaxxon,
My apologies for not following the forum standards, since i am very new to this forum i was not aware of this stuffs. I shall keep all the points mentioned by u when posting my new query.

Thanks,
Giri.

What you did is replacing "[" (and not "data3") with "/example/string"
Regards.

No i want to replace data3 and not '['.

Thanks,
Girish

Try this,

sed -e "s/\[data3\]/[\/example\/string\]/g"

We understood that - but this is what you actually did with your regexp:

If you want to replace "data3" with "something_else" the regexp for this is:

Code:

s/data3/something_else/

It might be that "data3" is occurring several times in the text and you want to change only the occurrences where "data3" is enclosed in rectangular brackets (change "[data3]", but not, say, "(data3)"), preserving the brackets.

for this the regexp would have to look like:

Code:

s/[data3]/[something_else]/

Notice that i put the the brackets to be preserved in the replacement string. Regexps work like that: first the search-part is searched for and - if it is found at all - everything matching this first part is removed from the line. Then the replacement string is prepared and inserted into the place where the search-string was.

As we matched to brackets before they would have been removed if they are not being reinserted with the replacement.

I hope this helps.

bakunin