How to replace one character inside parentheses keep everything else as is

Question

The data looks like this :

There is stuff here (word, word number phrases)
(word number anything, word phrases), even more
...

There is a l

Answer 1

While @randomir's sed solution dwells on replacing a single comma inside parentheses, there is a way to replace multiple commas inside parentheses with sed, too.

Here is the code:

sed '/(/ {:a s/\(([^,()]*\),/\1:/; t a}'

or

sed '{:a;s/\(([^,()]*\),/\1:/;ta}'

or

sed -E '{:a;s/(\([^,()]*),/\1:/;ta}'

See an online demo.

In all cases, the main part is between the curly braces. Here are the details for the POSIX ERE (sed with -E option) pattern:

• :a;
• s/(\([^,()]*),/\1:/; - find and capture into Group 1
  • \( - a ( char
  • [^,()]* - zero or more chars other than ,, ( and ) (so, only those commas will be removed that are in between the closest ( and ) chars, not inside (..,.(...,.) - remove ( from the bracket expression to also match in the latter patterns)
  • \1: - and replace with the Group 1 contents + a colon after it
• ta - loop to :a if there was a match at the preceding iteration.