Hello:

I am bringing this up again since we have gotten a little further and my previous comments and thus looking for some urgent input.

Well I have a csv file where some strings are enclosed by a quotation marks. We found that the following sed operation sed 's/\(".*\)[,]\(.*"\)/\1\2/g'
will remove the comma's within the quotation marks (if any exist)(this is what we want) only if one set of quotation marks exist within each line. When more than one set of quotation marks exists then the sed operation does not work on that particular line.

sed 's/\(".*\)[,]\(.*"\)/\1\2/g'

xxxxxxx,xxxxxxxx,"Russellville,",AR,xxxxxx,xxxxxxx ,xxxxxxxx,",ARLINGTON HEIGHTS,IL,60005,US,5.96,0.98,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, ,,,,

Therefore, does any one know how to pass a second or third or multiple arguments within the sed operations so when it does pass through a line with multiple quotes it understands it and executes the operation of removing the comma's which is what we want to accomplish.

how about something like this:

sed -e 's/\("[^,]*\)[,]\([^"]*"\)/\1\2/g' file

great posting!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! works great. Can you explain your thought process here so I can learn.

as 'ericbrunson' [from another forum has mentioned] sed's regex-s are "greedy" - specifying ".*" was eating up too much and you had to limit it to a ','.

How would you do that?
Well...... if we have "something followed by a comma" it means "anything BUT a comma followed by a comma":
[^,]*
anything BUT a comma repeated 0 or more times
[,]
followed by a comma.

You still have a problem if you have MULTIPLE quoted commas as in: