How to replace to apostrophe ' inside a file using SED

Question

I have a file \"test.txt\" that contain the following

+foo+
+bar+

What I want to do is to replace them into:

\'foo\'
\'bar\         


        

Answer 1

Use " instead. And add g flag to replace all.

sed  "s/\+/\'/g" test.txt

Answer 2

You can also replace all instances of + with ' in the file by using tr:

tr '+' "'" < inputfile

Answer 3

+ is not a special character without -r switch in sed. You can run the substitute command without any escaping:

echo '+foo+' | sed "s/+/'/g"

# output: 'foo'

If you want to save changed file then use:

sed -i.bak "s/+/'/g" test.txt

Answer 4

This might work for yoyu (GNU sed):

sed 'y/+/'\''/' file