How to replace all occurances of a complex string using sed
 

Can someone tell me what Im doing wrong. Im trying to replace all occurances of one string with another string.

I want to replace all occurances of downloads/index.php?folder/200706/ with dwnld/new_index.php?p= in a file called va_200706.php

I've tried the following:

as well as

There was a similiar question posted in which the solution was to use

sed s/SEARCHSTRING/REPLACESTRING/g

but I think the / in my strings are messing things up.

You need to 'escape' special characters with backslashes.

Eg:

And you don't even need to escape the "?" if IIRC. (or the "=" ???).

SOLVED: how to replace all occurances of a complex string
 

Thanks rkelsen, the backslashes did it.

Heres what I ended up using and it worked wonderfully:

I would have written that as:
The principle is the same: the 1st character after the 's' is the regex delimiter. AFAIK, any character may be chosen. I think using '\' is not desirable because then it cannot be used in its normal "escape character" role.

I have come to prefer ',' as my personal standard delimiter, but I have friends who use '!' or '#'. It's a matter of taste.

Although you would not want to use it here because it would require escaping the '?', you might also want to add the sed "-r" to your repertoire -- see the man page.

Also sed can edit the file directly using -i switch and will even make a backup copy.
The above edits the file va_200706.php and creates backup file va_200706.php.bak

oops too many clicks