Sed match and replace only certain characters

Question

I have mutliple strings in very similar format.

(#1111111)
(#4444444)

I was trying to use sed to provide an output:

1111111
4444444

I have tried:

sed  's/(#[0-9]+)/^[0-9]+/g'

which seems to match ok, but the replace is not working.

Answer 1

Given the format that you have in the question, there are two ways that this can be done:

sed 's/.*#\(.*\))/\1/' file

That will print everything between # and whatever comes before it which, in this case, is (, and ).

This can also be done:

sed -e 's|^(#||g' -e 's|)$||g' file

That will remove (# from the beginning of the string and ) from the end.

Output:

1111111
4444444

If it's a file, then you can add -i after sed to edit it in place. For stdout, pipe the command providing it into sed.

If this is a file or other output and there are differences, then you'll have to adjust the commands. I'm only operating on what you've provided in the question.