Sed replace string with whitespaces

Question

I have a string which has a format like this :

{u city : u Zurich , u name : u Hauptbahnhof , u address : u Test address, C106, Bahnhofsstrasse }

I need to remove all the " u " (with the spaces) and replace the ", u "(with the spaces) with a line breaker, but i have no idea how i could do that.

Is it possible with sed?

Output should be like

{city :Zurich 
name :Hauptbahnhof 
address :Test address, C106, Bahnhofsstrasse }

Thank you guys

Where did you obtain said string? To me it seems like an attempt to create JSON from Python, if so go fix your Python code. — Andreas Louv
– Andreas Louv, Commented Dec 16, 2016 at 8:57
it's from a json output which has been altered, but i have to use it like this unfortunately — Damon
– Damon, Commented Dec 16, 2016 at 8:59

choroba · Accepted Answer · 2016-12-16 09:03:26Z

2

The following seems to work (with some whitespace differences):

's/, u /\n/g;s/\bu //g'

i.e. first replace all ", u " with newlines, then remove all u, where u is not preceded by a word character.

Note that the output isn't a valid JSON.

edited Dec 16, 2016 at 9:03

answered Dec 16, 2016 at 9:02

choroba

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7 Comments

Andreas Louv Over a year ago

This is really fragile, as any word ending with u will get it removed.

choroba Over a year ago

@andlrc: fixed.

Damon Over a year ago

i get the error "unterminated `s' command" i use sed -e and i use it after a pipe, maybe that helps..

choroba Over a year ago

@Damon: please show the whole line. Also, what OS and sed version?

Damon Over a year ago

cat silo_json | sed -e 's/, u /\n/g;s/\bu //g' RHEL 6.8 GNU sed version 4.2.1

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Inian · Accepted Answer · 2016-12-16 09:10:10Z

1

Use perl command line substitution as below, used the \b tags for matching exact words and not mess up with other strings.

perl -pe 's/\bu \b//g;' -pe 's/\b , \b/\n/g;' file
{city : Zurich
name : Hauptbahnhof
address : Test address, C106, Bahnhofsstrasse }

And as pointed by others, if it is a broken JSON use jq or other ways to fix it.

answered Dec 16, 2016 at 9:10

Inian

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4 Comments

Damon Over a year ago

same problem as above i get the error "unterminated `s' command" i have to use the string like that and output doesn't need to be json

Damon Over a year ago

i used a tmp-file for your example to check if it works

Damon Over a year ago

.. my mistake i forgot to remove a sed statement in the script, your solution works perfectly.

Damon Over a year ago

yeah sure, sorry that i gave him the solution but his worked too and he brought it up first, but thanks again

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