Re: bin/50111: sed does not support \n newline in replacement patterns.

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

The following reply was made to PR bin/50111; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>
To: gnats-bugs%NetBSD.org@localhost
Cc: 
Subject: Re: bin/50111: sed does not support \n newline in replacement patterns.
Date: Sun, 02 Aug 2015 02:59:58 +0700

     Date:        Sat,  1 Aug 2015 12:25:00 +0000 (UTC)
     From:        achowe%snert.com@localhost
     Message-ID:  <20150801122500.515D9A654F%mollari.NetBSD.org@localhost>
 
 Please no.
 
 Because of ...
 
   | Historically, sed did not support "\n" sequences in the substitution
 
 it will always be non-portable to do so - whatever NetBSD's (or gnu's) sed
 decides to do.   If you really want to use non-portable extensions, just
 require & use gnu sed and be done with it.
 
 As for ...
 
   | So for example the current manner of splitting text with a newline is:
 [...]
   | When the above is used a shell script, any line/block indention would
   | be disrupted, because of requiring a backslash and literal newline.
 
 Not necessarily.   An example from one of my scripts that does some
 manipulation of HTML (this is just a fragment)
 
 NL='
 '
 sed     -e 's!\(.\)\(</*script>\)!\1\'"${NL}"'\2!g'             \
         -e 's/\(script[^>]*>\)\(.\)/\1\'"${NL}"'\2/g'           \
         -e 's/\(.\)<div/\1\'"${NL}"'<div/g'                     \
 	... [much more] ...
 
 If ${NL} was only to be used in sed subst expressions, the preceding \
 could be included in it as well.
 
 kre