I'm making replacments in PHP file and I need to change the language variable with sed. Here my WORKING code:
sed -i '' -e "s/\$config\['language'\] = \"english\";/\$config['language'] = '$LANGUAGE';/" Sources/$APP/application/config/config.php
This is not working to match any language set:
sed -i '' -e "s/\$config\['language'\] = \"*\";/\$config['language'] = '$LANGUAGE';/" Sources/$APP/application/config/config.php
What's wrong?
In sed, the asterisk (*) character denotes "repeat the previous thing 0 or more times." This is in contrast to a shell, where it expands to anything. What you want to do is shove a . (which means "anything"), right before the asterisk, like so:
sed -i '' -e "s/\$config\['language'\] = \".*\";/\$config['language'] = '$LANGUAGE';/" Sources/$APP/application/config/config.php
That will then tell your program "repeat any character (.) any number of times (*)".
That's because * doesn't do what you think it does. In a sed regular expression, as in all regular expressions, use .*? to mean any collection of characters (except newlines). That is because . means match anything once and * means match the previous item any number of times. The ? makes it non-greedy, meaning it will match as few characters as possible as long as the rest of the expression matches. I don't know what you input is so I can't tell if you need the question mark, better safe than sorry.
You need to replace the * in the expression with .*. * means "0 or more instances of the previous item" (in this case the "), so you want to first match . (any character), then state you want 0 or more instances of that.
