How to escape plus sign on mac os x (BSD) sed?

Question

I\'m trying to find and replace one or more occurrences of a character using sed on a mac, sed from the BSD General Commands.

I try:

echo \"foobar\"          


        

Answer 1

echo "foobar" | sed -e "s/o\\+//g"

worked for me on Mac OS X 10.6.

I remembered that I replaced my BSD version of sed with GNU sed 4.2, so this may or may not work for you.

Answer 2

Using the /g flag, s/o//g is enough to replace all o occurrences.

Why + doesn't work as expected: in old, obsolete re + is an ordinary character (as well as |, ?). You should specify -E flag to sed to make it using modern regular expressions:

echo "foobar" | sed -E -e "s/o+//"
# fbar

Source: man 7 re_format.

Answer 3

You can use this, on linux or unix.

echo "foobar" | perl -pe "s/o+//g"

Answer 4

Sed is sad for regexes. You could either try the -E, which might work with BSD, or you could try this one instead:

sed -e "s/o\{1,\}/"

Perhaps there are too many sed's out there to have a usable tool on any system.