In the process of converting a blog from WordPress to Hugo, I find that I need to do a global search and replace for tags to convert them to a list of strings.

Currently I have something like this:

tags: owl, owl2, rdfs, rdf, snippets, vscode, visual studio code

But I need something like this:

tags: ["owl", "owl2", "rdfs", "rdf", "snippets", "vscode", "visual studio code"]

I have a variety of editors such as VSCode, VS22, Neovim, Rider etc. at my disposal as well as sed, gawk etc, so any solution will do.

CodePudding user response：

To find all these with such a pattern: ^(tags: )|(, )|$.

Then the expected result for a given string can be achieved in 3 steps using VSCode:

1. Search for a string tags: (note there is a space) using command F/cntrl F and to a Replace field add a string tags: [".
2. Search for , (note there is a space) and replace it with ", ".
3. Depending on what's at the end of the line search for $ or \n (in a search dialog select Use Regular Expression option) and replace it with "].

CodePudding user response：

I would harness GNU sed for this task following way, let file.txt content be

tags: owl, owl2, rdfs, rdf, snippets, vscode, visual studio code

then

sed -e 's/ /["/' -e 's/$/"]/' -e 's/, /", "/g' file.txt

gives output

tags:["owl", "owl2", "rdfs", "rdf", "snippets", "vscode", "visual studio code"]

Explanation: I give three instructions

• replace space using [" once (i.e. it will affect only first space)
• replace end of line using "] (i.e. append "])
• replace , using ", " globally (i.e. it wil affect all , )

(tested in GNU sed 4.7)