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sed search and replace question

I want to search for a pattern across two consecutive lines and use part of that pattern to change part of the second line. I haven't been able to find anything about sed that would show me how to do it.

Everything I have found shows how to merge lines and add new blank lines but nothing shows how to do what I want.

I can do this all day long in Vim but I want to do it in the bash shell using sed or sed & awk or something else because I have several dozen files to do this on and opening them in Vim is painfully slow.

This single line below will find a pattern across two consecutive lines then put back everything one the first line and the second line with some added content.

Code:

s_^\([ </p>]*<h2 id="\)\(b0[0-9][0-9]c[0-1][0-9][0-9]\)\(" class="chapter">[0-9]\+</h

2><p>\)\n\([ ]*\)\([A-Z]\)_\1\2\3\r\4<span id="\2v001" class="verse">1</span> \5_

Does anyone know how to do this with sed or something else on the shell cli?

Give us an example of the two consecutive lines _and_ an example of the result you want to accomplish.

What I have
<h2 id="b001c001" class="chapter">1</h2><p>
I

What I want
<h2 id="b001c001" class="chapter">1</h2><p>
<span id="b001c001v001" class="verse">1</span> I

The second line has more than just the one capital letter but the rest of the line isn't touched or changed. Like I said in my OP this works all day long in Vim very well. I would rather run it from the cli doing about 1200 pairs of lines within several dozen files.

here is a tutorial about multi line regex and sed: http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html#uh-51
otherwise perl is suggested, probably it handles this case better

this will do something similar (what you wish), but I'm not really sure:

Code:

perl -we '

undef $/;

while ( <> ) { s!

              ^([ ]*</p>)?                            # $1

              (<h2[ ]id=")                            # $2

              (b0[0-9][0-9]c[0-1][0-9][0-9])          # $3

              ("[ ]class="chapter">[0-9]+</h2><p>)    # $4

              \n                                      # $

              ([ ]*)                                  # $5

              ([A-Z])                                  # $6

              !$2$3$4\n$5<span id="$3v001" class="verse">1</span> $6

              !msx;

              print;

            }' inputfile