using sed replace the new line with character

I am using sed to remove the new line and replace with <br> but I am not able to get the desired output.

I wrote:

find . -name $1 -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '' -e 's|\n|ABC|g'

...but this doesn't work.

4 Answers

Your sed expression is treating each line separately - so it doesn't actually read the newline character into the pattern buffer and hence can't replace it. If you just want to add <br> while retaining the actual newline as well, you can just use the end-of-line marker $ and do

sed -i'' 's|$|<br>|' file

Note that the empty backup file name - if you use it - must directly follow the -i like -i''; also the -e is not necessary when using a single expression.

OTOH if you really want to replace actual newline characters, you need to jump through some extra hoops, for example

sed -i'' -e :a -e '$!N;s/\n/<br>/;ta' -e 'P;D' file

or, more compactly

sed -i'' ':a; $!N; s|\n|<br>|; ta; P;D' file

which read successive pairs of lines into the pattern buffer and then replace the intervening newline - see Famous Sed One-Liners Explained.

If you want to replace the new line and with <br>, you can use

 find . -name $1 -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/.*$/&<br\>/'

Why not just

find . -name $1 | xargs sed -ri "s/$/<br>/"

?

(Try without the i, first ;-) )

To replace inline \n with <br>, just use perl (or sed), needless to call find for that task:

perl -pi -e "s/$/<br>/" myfile

Or for an alias:

alias brtag='perl -pi -e "s/$/<br>/" $1'