Substitution on Range of Lines

Find and replace text in a file between range of lines using sed

You can use sed addresses:

sed '19,33s/google/facebook/g' file

This will run the substitution on lines between and including 19 and 33.

The form of a sed command is as follows:

[address[,address]]function[arguments]

Where 19,33 is the addreses,

substitute is function

and global is the argument

How to perform sed replacement on range of lines?

You were close

sed -i '200,220 s/1 2 3 4 5 /replacement numbers/' file

in 200-220 range this will replace '1 2 3 4 5 ' with other stuff only once (per line). If more replacements needed than added g here ...numbers/g' file and so on

Substitution on range of lines

Each can be done with something similar to this:

sed -i "s/<host><\/host>/<host>my_db<\/host>/" foo.txt

The -i means that it'll overwrite the file in-place. Remove that flag to have the changes written to stdout.

If this is for a regular task to fill in details for the file, consider adding anchors to the file to make it easier. For example:

<host>DB_HOST</host>

Then the sed would just need to be:

sed -i 's/DB_HOST/my_db/'

replace line feeds with sed in a certain range of line

Edited again

Try awk:

awk '{l=substr($0,1,10);r=substr($0,11);gsub(/n/,"m",l);print l r}' file

where l is the left part of the string and r is the right and gsub() does global substitutions.

Edited

I would probably use Bash parameter substitution for that - documentation here:

#!/bin/bash
while read line
do
   left=${line:1:16}    # Get left 16 chars
   right=${line:17}     # Get remainder of line
   left=${left//n/m}    # Do global replacement in left part
   echo $left $right    # Show output
done < file

Original answer

Sure, just on lines 2-8

sed '2,8s/foo/bar/' file

Or, between start and end patterns:

sed '/start/,/end/s/foo/bar/' file

perl idiom for substituting in a line range (sed-like)

There is. What you have in perl is the 'range operator'.

It goes a bit like this:

if ( m/Page 5:/ .. m/Page 6:/ ) { 
     s/this/that/g;
}

This will evaluate as 'true' if you're between the two patterns, and false otherwise.

E.g.:

use strict;
use warnings;

while (<DATA>) {
    if ( m/Page 5:/ .. m/Page 6:/ ) {
        s/this/that/g;
    }
    print;
}

__DATA__

Page 1:
this
this
more this
Page 5:
this 
this this
this
Page 6:
this 
more this
and some more this

search and replace through multiple ranges in vim

Haha... ok, replacing linebreaks with spaces in the first range causes my second range to not exist, as lines 12-18 change to something like 3-9. Solution is to flip the ranges so the range later in the file comes first in the command:

:12,18s/\n/ /g | 2,10&&

Search and replace in a range of line and column

:1,2 s/\%3cBBB/YYY/

\%3c means third column (see :help /\%c or more globally :help pattern)

Search and replace in vim in specific lines

Vim has special regular expression atoms that match in certain lines, columns, etc.; you can use them (possibly in addition to the range) to limit the matches:

:5,12s/\(\%5l\|\%12l\)foo/bar/g

See :help /\%l

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