On 28 Jun 2024 14:04 -0500, from rowl...@access.net (Richard Owlett): > I need to replace ANY occurrence of > <span class="verse" id="V1"> > thru [at most] > <span class="verse" id="V119"> > by > <sup> > > I'm reformatting a Bible stored in HTML format for a particular set of > vision impaired seniors (myself included). Each chapter is in its own file. > > How do I open a file. > Do the above replacement. > Save and close the file.
Ignoring the question about Emacs and focusing on the goal (your question otherwise is an excellent example of a XY question), this is not something regular expressions are very good at. However, since it's presumably a once-only operation, I assume that you can live with it being done in a suboptimal way in terms of performance. In that case, assuming for simplicity that all the files are in a single directory, you could try something similar to: $ for v in $(seq 1 119); do sed -i 's,<span class="verse" id="V'$v'">,<sup>,g' ./*.html; done Be sure to have a copy in case something goes wrong; and diff(1) a few files afterwards to make sure that the result is as you intended. Yes, it almost certainly can be done with a single sed (or other similar tool) invocation where the regular expression matches precisely what you want it to match. But unless this is something you will do very often, I tend to prefer readability over being clever, even if the readable version is somewhat less performant. -- Michael Kjörling 🔗 https://michael.kjorling.se “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”
