UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm changing some html code on multiple web pages and I need to match particular phrases but keep some text within each phrase.

E.G. I need to change this line:

<DIV id="heading">Description:</DIV>

into

<span class="hlred">Description:</span><br />


The text "Description:" may change and sometimes occurs more than once. I am using a for loop to run the script several times.

I can't "grep" description because this may change, however "heading" is consistent but its getting rid of final
</DIV> and keeping the text that is eluding me.
Hope the example is clear, thanks in advance for any help with this.

Code:

sed 's/^.*heading.*>\(.*\)<.*/<span class="hlred">\1<\/span><br \/>/g' yourfile.html

This will work only if your DIV are alone on the line.

The pattern

Code:

\(.*\)

is used to capture an element that can be used with the

Code:

\1

in the second part of the sed

Thank you very much, script works perfectly, will read up on capture element \1 using sed