How to remove single quotes from a string using sed

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If I need to remove the following line from certain files
ob_start('ffggg_ggg');

I have tried
grep -rl "ob_start('ffggg_ggg');" /pathtosearch | xargs sed -i 's/[ob_start('ffggg_ggg');]//g'

but the rest of the characters have been removed except for single quotes.

How can I remove single quotes from a string using sed command?

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Responses

Dusan Baljevic's picture Guru 2449 points
29 June 2022 12:02 AM

Hi Ashik,

Maybe I misunderstood your question, but this is simple way to remove what you want:

sed -i -e "s/ob_start('ffggg_ggg');//g" <myfile>

I did a quick test in a file with three lines having your string:

ob_start('ffggg_ggg'); string at beginning of line test 1
string in middle of line ob_start('ffggg_ggg'); test 2
string at end of line test 3 ob_start('ffggg_ggg');

SED command worked well.

Regards,

Dusan Baljevic (amateur radio VK2COT)

AS Community Member 22 points
2 July 2022 2:03 AM

Hi Dusan,

This one has worked well for me also. Thank you so much for your valuable time.

AS Community Member 22 points
2 July 2022 2:03 AM

Hi Dusan,

This one has worked well for me also. Thank you so much for your valuable time.

RJ Hinton's picture Guru 21034 points
2 July 2022 3:58 AM

Also this...

[ me@myworkstation ~ ] # cat blah.txt
blah
#
blah
#blahblah
ob_start('ffggg_ggg');

[ me@myworkstation ~ ] # sed -i    "s#ob_start('ffggg_ggg');##g"  blah.txt
[ me@myworkstation ~ ] # grep ob_start    blah.txt
[ me@myworkstation ~ ] # echo "in case I am misreading, another example follows"
[ me@myworkstation ~ ] # sed -i    "s#'ffggg_ggg'##g"  blah.txt
[ me@myworkstation ~ ] # echo "Now the last example only removes what is between the two pound (or hash) characters"

Regards,
RJ