I would like to use sed to escape all non-escaped occurrences of a character, say "&", in a string contained in variable text. What I do is

text='one&two\&three'
sed 's/\([^\\]\)&/\1\\&/g' <<< "${text}"

and I expect the output to be one\&two\&three. However, what I get is

one\e&two\&three

What I (try to) do:

• the search pattern \([^\\]\)& should match any occurrence of & not preceded by a backslash, and store the character that precedes & in \1
• the replace pattern \1\\& should put a backslash in between & and the previous character, however it acts as \\\1& for some strange reason

What am I doing wrong here?

1 Answer

Why your command fails:

You did:

sed 's/\([^\\]\)&/\1\\&/g' <<< "${text}"

• [^\\]\ matches any character except \, and put that in matched group 1, then & matches a literal &. So for one&two\&three, this will match e before first &, put that in captured group 1. For the & before three this won't be matched as \ is before &

• In the replacement you have used \1\\&, so the output becomes one\e&two\&three because:

  • \1 is replaced by e
  • then two \\s is treated as single \. that gives us e\ till now
  • then & will match the full match i.e. e& i.e. & will not be escaped as you were thinking

• So, the matched portion i.e. e& is replaced with e\e&

  You would get the desired result, if you were using another \ before & (As two \\ make one \, so you need one before & too:

  sed 's/\([^\\]\)&/\1\\\&/g' <<<"${text}"

  As Ubuntu's sed supports ERE (Extended Regular Expression), you can use the -E or -r option to enable that to get rid of the ()s while capturing:

  sed -E 's/([^\\])&/\1\\\&/g' <<<"${text}"

---

Alternate approach:

First, removing \s before all &s, and then adding \ before all &:

sed -E 's/[\]+(&)/\1/g; s/&/\\&/g'

This is composed of two sed statements:

• s/[\]+(&)/\1/g removes all \s before & in the string (line)

• s/&/\\&/g adds a \ too all & in the string (line)

---

Example:

% text='one&two\&three'
% sed 's/\([^\\]\)&/\1\\\&/g' <<< "${text}"
one\&two\&three
% sed -E 's/([^\\])&/\1\\\&/g' <<< "${text}"
one\&two\&three
% sed -E 's/[\]+(&)/\1/g; s/&/\\&/g' <<<"$text"
one\&two\&three

2

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