Greetings

I have a line of text with multiple web links in the line. I'd like to replace the actual links with the text "<web-link>" so I don't accidently hit them while reading on my iphone. I've tried many versions of the following sed command, sed 's/(http.*)/<web_link>/g', but it simply replaces everything between the first instance of "(http" and the last instance of ")" with <web_link>, or does nothing at all.

ex.)
This line has a link to a web page (http://www.webpage.com/file.html ) then some more text (extra text) and then another link (http://www.nextwebpage.com.index.html ) to a website.

$ echo "This line has a link to a web page (http://www.webpage.com/file.html ) then some more text (extra text) and then another link (http://www.nextwebpage.com.index.html ) to a website." | sed 's/(http.*)/<web_link>/g'

what I get is:
This line has a link to a web page <web_link> to a website.

what I'd like is:
This line has a link to a web page <web_link> then some more text (extra text) and then another link <web_link> to a website.

What am I doing wrong with my sed command?

Regex's are greedy, they will match as much as possible. In order to make it non-greedy, try
Note how I use the "everything but )" character class rather than "everything"

tuxdev,

Thanks for the reply. It works great, altho I'm still not sure why. I'm not even sure what question to ask. Let me take a stab. So yours is saying "everything from '(http' thru to the 'first instance of )', then repeat for 'all instances of )'"?

Thanks again,
Rod

No....his code says:
find a literal "(http", followed by any character, followed by any number of characters that are NOT ")"

replace all instances with whatever is between the last two slashes.

oops, that '.' was a bit of a typo.. that ultimately didn't really change much, but still..

As pixellany said, (http[^)]*) means the literal "(http" followed by zero or more characters that are not ), followed by a )