Re: Need a regex to replace incomplete html entities

I basically want to replace the string &,&#,&#3,&#38 to blank, but it should not replace &#38;

This seems to be contradictory: you want to replace &#38, but don't want to do it.

Please explain.

Update: added code tags because some characters were dropped from &#38 rendering the post difficult to understand.

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Re^2: Need a regex to replace incomplete html entities by Chris Daniel (Novice) on Nov 20, 2016 at 11:16 UTC
I am looking like if & is not followed by #38; then replace the & to blank. `If a line consist of & or &# or &#3 or &#38 should be replaced to blan +k but & should not be affected.` [download] Note: File is 200+ MB so thinking to apply sed command.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Need a regex to replace incomplete html entities by Laurent_R (Canon) on Nov 20, 2016 at 12:02 UTC
If I understand you correctly, the important difference is the semi-colon: you want to replace `&#38`, but not if it is followed by a semi-colon (i.e. you don't want to replace `&`). The poor formatting in your post made it difficult to understand that. The easy solution is to use a negative look-ahead, as already suggested in other posts, but I doubt that `sed` supports look-ahead assertions (it may depend which version). Besides, even for a 200 MB file, this should not be a problem in Perl. Last time I compared the performance of Perl and `sed`, I did not find a really significant performance difference between them, but, again, this may depend on the implementation of the `sed` version you're using.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^4: Need a regex to replace incomplete html entities by Chris Daniel (Novice) on Nov 20, 2016 at 14:45 UTC
You got correct Laurent. Thanks for the update and look ahead assertion. The reason I focus on sed command is, I want to parse the xml file which has similar multiple <Remarks> tag. But since file consist of incomplete html entities, parser is not able to parse the file. Hence I was planning to use sed command to replace the code and then parse it.	[reply]