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Section Removal With sed; and With a Twist . . .

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# 1  
Old 10-03-2014
Section Removal With sed; and With a Twist . . .
Hello folks!

Raised a bump on my head trying to figure this one out Smilie

I have an xml file which needs to be edited, removing an entire property section in the work. Here's what the target section layout looks like:
Code:
<property name="something">
{any number of lines go here}
</property>
</property>

Now, sed-deleting all from <property name="something"> to the first </property> tag is a fairly straightforward affair:
Code:
sed -i '/<property name="something">[[:space:]]*$/,/<\/property>[[:space:]]*$/d' /path_to/filename.xml

...but encompassing the SECOND </property> tag is not quite so straightforward; and I can't quite decipher where the tweak goes to make things turn...

A quick note, anyone?


Thanks again Smilie
Last edited by LinQ; 10-04-2014 at 12:19 PM.. Reason: Quote tags ====>>>> CODE tags
# 2  
Old 10-03-2014
Code:
awk '
/<property name="something">/ {f++; next}
f==0 {print; next}
/<property/ {f++}
/<\/property>/ {f--}
' /path_to/filename.xml

This User Gave Thanks to MadeInGermany For This Post:
LinQ
# 3  
Old 10-03-2014
Hello Linq,

Could you please use following, not tested though.
Lets say we have file as follows.
Code:
cat file420
ydudjccjxtdzhsfz`
<property name="something">
{any number of lines go here}
</property>
</property> 
abcdefg
jhdwygdebehb
wehkcgiwegceb

Following is the code may help.

Code:
awk 'NR==1 && $0 !~ /<property/ {B=-1} /<property/ {B=1}  {if(B <= 0 && $0 !~ /<\/property>/) {print $0}} /<\/property>/ {B--}' file420

Output will be as follows.

Code:
ydudjccjxtdzhsfz`
abcdefg
jhdwygdebehb
wehkcgiwegceb

Thanks,
R. Singh
Last edited by RavinderSingh13; 10-03-2014 at 06:02 PM..
This User Gave Thanks to RavinderSingh13 For This Post:
LinQ
# 4  
Old 10-03-2014
Thanks, folks, for the awk help; but isn't there a way of doing this with sed?

(kinda like the OP ... trying to learn this stuff)

Smilie
# 5  
Old 10-03-2014
I won't say there is no way to do this with sed, but a stream text editor (i.e., sed) is not designed to do arithmetic any more than a calculator (such as bc or dc) is designed to do text processing. If you have a problem that does text processing and math, awk is usually a much better tool to consider if you can't do what you want entirely in the shell.
This User Gave Thanks to Don Cragun For This Post:
LinQ
# 6  
Old 10-03-2014
@Don Cragun:

Thanks for the heads up.

One last question for the road: What might the proper syntax be to simply allow the OP commandline to add one line to the region which is deleted? Been having a goose of a time with braces, semicolons, et al; all while trying to get a grip on the logic flow...

While not exactly a full solution (unlike the awk blocks presented by MadeInGermany and RavinderSingh13), it'd help broaden my syntax mastery just a wee bit Smilie

Thanks again --
# 7  
Old 10-03-2014
Code:
sed -e '/start/,/end/ a\Adding this line after the found block'

sed -e '/start/,/end/ c\Changing the found block for this line'
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