[ILUG] Multi line regular expression help

[Marcus Furlong]

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 20:09, Kingsley G. Morse Jr. <kingsley at loaner.com> wrote:
> Hi Marcus,
>
> Here's a sample script that may help.
>
> It echos your data into a pipe of two seds.
>
> Maybe you can quickly and easily see it work by
> using your mouse to copy and paste it into a
> command line.
>
>
>
> #!/bin/bash
>
> echo "<tag>(FR) text
>
> <tag> - (FR) text
>
> <tag> (FR)
> text
>
> <tag>
> (FR) text
>
> <tag>
>  - (FR) text
>
> <tag>
> othertext - (FR) text
>
> <tag>othertext - (FR) text
>
> <tag>othertext -
> (FR) text" | sed -E -n '/<tag>/{N; s/\n//; s/<tag>(.*)\(FR\)/<tag language="FR" attribute=\1>/g;p;}' | sed 's/> \?/>\n/g'
>
>
>
> It seems to me that useful examples are at
>
>    http://codesnippets.joyent.com/posts/show/2111
>
> I hope that helps,

It does, thanks.

With this one I was able to get to here:

sed -E -n '/>/{N; s/\n//; s/>(.*)\(([FR|PT|ES|GA]*)\)/ language="\2"
attribute="\1">/g;p;}' | sed -e 's/> \?/>\n/g'

which almost does what it should. I tried to get rid of the extra
spaces and dash if they were there using [ ]*-*[ ]* but it never seems
to match (although _just_ one space either side will match).

Also, is there any way in sed to specify "only two of these
characters"? So instead of FR|PT|ES etc I could use something like
[A-Z]2

Marcus
-- 
Marcus Furlong