How to remove string between two characters and before the first occurrence using sed

Question

I would like to remove the string between ":" and the first "|" using sed.

input: |abc:1.2.3|def|

output from sed: |abc|def|

I managed to come up with sed 's|\(:\)[^|]*|\1|', but this sed command does not remove the first character (":"). How can I modify this command to also remove the colon?

Answer 1

1st solution: With awk you could try following awk program.

awk 'match($0,/:[^|]*/){print substr($0,1,RSTART-1) substr($0,RSTART+RLENGTH)}' Input_file

Explanation: Using match function of awk, where matching from : to till first occurrence of | here. So what match function does is, whenever a regex is matched in it, it will SET values for its OOTB variables named RSTART and RLENGTH, so based on that we are printing sub-string to neglect matched part and print everything else as per required output in question.

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2nd solution: Using FPAT option in GNU awk, try following, written and tested with your shown samples only.

awk -v FPAT=':[^|]*' '{print $1,$2}'  Input_file