sed replace quotation marks

Question

I have the string

"Motor des regionalen Neuen Forums"

and want to replace the quotation marks to have

\q{Motor des regionalen Neuen Forums}

gloablly in a file.

How do I do that with sed? Or any other unix tool? Thanks

Answer 1

You can use the following sed command:

sed 's/"\([^"]\+\)"/\\q{\1}/g' your_file

See demo showing how this regex works. In sed, you just need to escape capturing parentheses ((...)) and the quantifier +. The escape symbol should be doubled to represent a literal \ in the replacement pattern, where a back-reference to the text matched with the first capturing group is used.