Character replacement inside multiple matched pattern

Question

Let's say I have a sentence like this

The quick, (brown, fox) jumps over, the (lazy, old, dog)

I want to replace all the commas , inside parentheses () to colons :, however commas that are not enclosed by parentheses should not be replaced. The output should be like

The quick, (brown: fox) jumps over, the (lazy: old: dog)

Notice that the number of commas and parentheses are not fixed in each sentence. How can use shell related tools (bash, sed, awk etc.) to achieve this result?

I have tried to use sed 's/[^(]*\(([^)]*)\)/\1/g; s/,/:/g' to make substitution to all matched groups, but not sure how to plug the results back to the original sentence.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 08 '17 at 07:33

2

If your actual Input_file is same as shown Input then following may help you in same.

awk -F"[)(]" '{for(i=2;i<=NF;i+=2){gsub(/,/,":",$i);$i="("$i")"}} 1'  Input_file

Output will be as follows.

The quick,  (brown: fox)  jumps over, the  (lazy: old: dog)

answered Nov 08 '17 at 07:33

RavinderSingh13

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Nice idea on using loop with step 2 increment! However it seems that some additional spaces are generated, is there any way to avoid it? – etopylight Nov 08 '17 at 07:43
Solved it with `OFS=""`, thanks! – etopylight Nov 08 '17 at 08:10
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@etopylight Are you sure it works as expected? Try with [`, even more :) with smilies`](https://ideone.com/2niHXA) added to the test string. [This is the correct `awk` answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/47084209/3832970) (just change `sub` to `gsub`). – Wiktor Stribiżew Nov 08 '17 at 09:16
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@WiktorStribiżew Good catch! That's a more robust solution which handles unclosed parentheses nicely. – etopylight Nov 08 '17 at 09:36
@WiktorStribiżew, thanks for letting know. – RavinderSingh13 Nov 08 '17 at 09:37
I also have a sed solution, but I will most probably post it in the original thread. – Wiktor Stribiżew Nov 08 '17 at 09:41

Character replacement inside multiple matched pattern

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