I have a couple of lines in a document which looks something like that:
foo-bar-foo[Foo - Bar]
I'd like to select every - character up until the first [ bracket on every line. Thus the - in the square brackets shouldn't be selected.
How can I achieve that with a Regex?
I already have this regex /.+?(?=\[)/g, which selects every character until the first [ but I only want the -.
Edit: I want to replace these selected characters with the sed command (GNU).
You can use
sed -E ':a; s/^([^[-]+)-/\1/; ta'
See an online demo:
#!/bin/bash
s='foo-bar-foo[Foo - Bar]'
sed -E ':a; s/^([^[-]+)-/\1/; ta' <<< "$s"
# => foobarfoo[Foo - Bar]
Details:
-E - enabling POSIX ERE syntax (so that there is no need to escape capturing parentheses and the + quantifier):a - an a labels/^([^[-]+)-/\1/ - finds one or more chars other than [ and - from the start of string capturing this substring into Group 1 (\1) and then matches a - charta - jumps to a label upon a successful replacement