How to scrub emails from all CSVs in a directory?

Question

I have this regex that works fine enough for my purposes for identifying emails in CSVs within a directory using grep on Mac OS X:

grep --no-filename -E -o "\b[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\b" *

I've tried to get this working with sed so that I can replace the emails with [email protected]:

sed -E -i '' -- 's/\b[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\b/[email protected]/g' *

However, I can't seem to get it to work. Admittedly, sed and regex are not my strong points. Any ideas?

Please note that your regex fails on `[email protected]`. It leaves the `myAddress`. — Laurel, Apr 03 '16 at 01:04
Yep, that's true. I know creating an email for regex is notoriously difficult. But this is good enough for my purposes. I'm not concerned as much with the regex as I am with how to integrate it into sed. — foobar0100, Apr 03 '16 at 01:09
@rock321987 Yes, I want to change all files. There is just 1 directory - it does not need to be recursive. — foobar0100, Apr 03 '16 at 04:26
`sed -E -i 's/\b[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\b/[email protected]/g' *`..see if it works..its working for me — rock321987, Apr 03 '16 at 04:26
@rock321987 I get `sed: 1: "filename.csv": unterminated substitute in regular expression` — foobar0100, Apr 03 '16 at 04:31
Let us [continue this discussion in chat](http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/108068/discussion-between-foobar0100-and-rock321987). — foobar0100, Apr 03 '16 at 04:38

rock321987 · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-03T05:14:52.823

0

The sed in OSX is broken. Replace it with GNU sed using Homebrew that will be used as a replacement for the one bundled in OSX. Use this command for installation

sudo brew install gnu-sed

and use this for substitution

sed -E -i 's/\b[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\b/[email protected]/g' *

Reference

edited Apr 03 '16 at 05:14

answered Apr 03 '16 at 05:04

rock321987

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"Broken" how? The example you link to shows somebody using incorrect syntax and then concluding that his sed is "broken". – Benjamin W. Apr 03 '16 at 05:33
@BenjaminW. I googled for `unterminated substitute in regular expression` and found that link..The same `sed` is working fine on `ubuntu` – rock321987 Apr 03 '16 at 05:37
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It's not because it's "broken", it's because they use different dialects of the `sed` scripting language. *BSD (and thus OSX) is closer to the original and to POSIX, whereas GNU `sed` has a large number of nonstandard extensions. Not supporting those extensions is not "broken"; if anything, a script which requires those extensions is. – tripleee Apr 03 '16 at 06:09
@tripleee feel free to edit my answer. I don't know anything about `OSX sed`.. I thought it as standard error – rock321987 Apr 03 '16 at 06:12

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:24

You seem to assume that grep and sed support the same regex dialect, but that is not necessarily, or even usually, the case.

If you want a portable solution, you could easily use Perl for this, which however supports yet another regex dialect...

perl -i -p -e 's/\b[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\b/[email protected]/g' *

For a bit of an overview of regex dialects, see https://stackoverflow.com/a/11857890/874188

Your regex kind of sucks, but I understand that is sort of beside the point here.

How to scrub emails from all CSVs in a directory?

2 Answers2