Shell Programming and Scripting

Well, PERL is more a language than a script, although some use it more to call executables than PERL libs! It has a pretty unique place, being as full featured as C/C++/JAVA but more script-interpret-like than JAVA, where you start worrying about heap space. I just jump all the way back and forth from ksh to C/C++/JAVA without stopping in the middle. Some I know live mostly in the middle happily enough.

The REGEX people seem to have moved in a PERL direction, to the point of introducing incompatibilities, and you now have to test which era you are coding in! Is it '\b', \<' or '(^|[^a-zA-Z0-9_])' for the left side of a word or identifier?

ksh93 solution using regular expression with backreference:

Code:

re='(<name>)(?*)(</name>)'

while read line
do
   [[ $line == ${re} ]] && print ${line/${re}/\2}
done < infile

Does that ksh92 bit work for 2+ name elements on the same line?

Usually, you have to trim the left one you find off the line and then reevaluate the rest of the line.

@fpmurphy: I tried your ksh script, and it did not work running version "sh (AT&T Research) 93t+ 2010-06-21". Can you enlighten me as to what I did wrong?

I used dtksh, which is a ksh 93 derivitive, and got a blank line:

Code:

$ echo '<name>ho</name><name>ha</name>' >infile
$ while read line
do
   [[ $line == ${re} ]] && print ${line/${re}/\2}
done < infile
 
$