How to enclose every line in a file in double quotes with sed?

Question

This is what I tried: sed -i 's/^.*/"$&"/' myFile.txt

It put a $ at the beginning of every line.

Solution 1

here it is

sed 's/\(.*\)/"\1"/g'

Solution 2

shorter

sed 's/.*/"&"/'

without spaces

sed 's/ *\(.*\) *$/"\1"/'

skip empty lines

sed '/^ *$/d;s/.*/"&"/'

Solution 3

You almost got it right. Try this slightly modified version:

sed 's/^.*$/"&"/g' file.txt

Solution 4

You can also do it without a capture group:

sed 's/^\|$/"/g'

'^' matches the beginning of the line, and '$' matches the end of the line.

The | is an "Alternation", It just means "OR". It needs to be escaped here[1], so in english ^\|$ means "the beginning or the end of the line".

"Replacing" these characters is fine, it just appends text to the beginning at the end, so we can substitute for ", and add the g on the end for a global search to match both at once.

[1] Unfortunately, it turns out that | is not part of the POSIX "Basic Regular Expressions" but part of "enhanced" functionality that can be compiled in with the REG_ENHANCED flag, but is not by default on OSX, so you're safer with a proper basic capture group like s/^\(.*\)$/"\1"/

Humble pie for me today.

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Comments

[nw.]

hmm, this one seems to have no effect at all.

[nw.]

do i need to escape double quotes in powershell or something?

[funroll]

Works great on OS X Yosemite.

[funroll]

If you understand the magic of sed, can you explain what this is actually doing?

[Josh Padnick]

For unix/linux beginners, you may want to do something like cat filename.txt | sed 's/\(.*\)/"\1"/g' to feed your input into sed.

[ASten]

I've tried all the answers listed above, nothing works for me but this trick does! Thanks.

[Backgammon]

cat file | <thing> is a classically incorrect use of cat. Use file redirection to pass files into standard input: sed 's/\(.*\)/"\1"/g' < filename.txt.