Re: sed and less/greater than symbols

[Tapani Tarvainen]

address@hidden (Eli Zaretskii) writes:

> On Wed, 21 Feb 2001, Gregory D. Henderson wrote:
> 
> > I've been trying to use sed (v3.02) to operate on HTML files. It appears 
> > that
> > the "<" and ">" cannot be used in substitutions.
> 
> You should be able to use them by escaping them.
> 
> > Escaping the symbols shouldn't be necessary,
> 
> ??? AFAIK, these are meta-characters in GNU Sed, so why is it wrong to 
> escape them?

They are not metacharacters in Gnu sed nor any sed that I know of.
Gnu sed supports '\<' and '\>' pairs as word delimiters but
otherwise < and > are just normal characters.
If escaping them were necessary Gnu sed would not be
standard-conforming (as per POSIX.2), but it is not:

$ echo '<>' | sed 's-<->x-'
>x>

That's with Gnu sed 3.02.

And I have used it to edit HTML files with no problems.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen