sed: Replace part of a line

Question

How can one replace a part of a line with sed?

The line

DBSERVERNAME     xxx

should be replaced to:

DBSERVERNAME           


        

Answer 1

You shouldn't be escaping your parens. Try:

echo "DBSERVERNAME    xxx" | sed -rne 's/(dbservername)[[:blank:]]+([[:alpha:]]+)/\1 yyy/gip'