why am I getting spaces in sed 's/[a-z]*/(&)/g'

Question

I want to add parenthesis to all words I used

sed \'s/[a-z]*/(&)/g\' 

inputfile.txt

hola crayola123456
abc123456
         


        

Answer 1

Two errors:

1. * means 0 or more matches, you need at least one match, then +;
2. sed (OSX version) uses basic regexp by default (so + isn't available), you should activate extended regexp syntax with option -E.

Then:

echo "hola abc1234 foo12 bar" | sed -E 's/[a-z]+/(&)/g'

produces:

(hola) (abc)1234 (foo)12 (bar)