Sed: replace first occurrence of a string in every line

find and replacesed

Imagine I have a file like this:

INSERT INTO table VALUES('1','<p><em>The lazy fox jumps again</em></p>bunch of other html<p><em>Is the lazy fox crazy?</em></p>')
INSERT INTO table VALUES('2','<p><em>The lazy fox jumps again</em></p>bunch of other html<p><em>Is the lazy fox crazy?</em></p>')
INSERT INTO table VALUES('3','<p><em>The lazy fox jumps again</em></p>bunch of other html<p><em>Is the lazy fox crazy?</em></p>')

And I wish to delete only the first occurrence of <p><em> and </em></p> so I end up with something like this:

INSERT INTO table VALUES('1','The lazy fox jumps againbunch of other html<p><em>Is the lazy fox crazy?</em></p>')
INSERT INTO table VALUES('2','The lazy fox jumps againbunch of other html<p><em>Is the lazy fox crazy?</em></p>')
INSERT INTO table VALUES('3','The lazy fox jumps againbunch of other html<p><em>Is the lazy fox crazy?</em></p>')

… how can I do that with sed (or perl)? The statement…:

sed "1,/INSERT INTO/s/<p><em>//g"

… only replaces the first occurrence in the file, not on every line.

Help is much appreciated.

Best Answer

If you want to process all lines with INSERT INTO, do not provide address range. If you want to only replace the first occurence of a string, do not provide /g:

sed -e '/INSERT INTO/s/<p><em>//' -e '/INSERT INTO/s/<\/em><\/p>//'
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