Grep a odd string

[Dooley]

Hey I was converting excel files for use in a mysql database.
I converted the xls to mdb then found a tool that converts mdb to mysql.
Long story short the mysql seems to have a problem with the insert statements, when I edit the file with geany the syntax goes weird with \' in the varchars. I think the \ is added to every word it ' in it, ie doesn't goes to doesn\'t. The syntax is also bad when I get rid of the \ ie doesn't.

So is it possible to maybe grep the .sql for every \' and replace it with nothing.
I tried simply grep \' myfile.sql and it returns every line.

Can anyone help???

Thanks.

[anomie]

Don't you want to preserve the apostrophe?

e.g. "Doesn't" is different than "Doesnt". (The latter is neither a contraction nor a word at all.)

Personally I'd look closely at other options/features available in the conversion tool. Someone must have thought of a case where apostrophes need to be kept.

[Franklin52]

If you want to replace \' with nothing this should work:

sed 's/\\'"'"'//g' file > newfile

However, as anomie mentioned "Doesn't" is different than "Doesnt" so if you only want to delete the backslash you can do something like:

sed 's/\\//g' file > newfile

Regards

[Dooley]

Yeah I'm thinking the conversion tool adds the \ behind all apostrophes, to preserve the data. My text editor was detecting this as a problem.

However this wasn't the problem at all.

It turns out when people we're entering text into the system the would sometimes accidently press \ so the mysql tables had \' which made the sql inserting tool go crazy. So I took out the few rare instances it happened and the data inserted perfectly.

Thanks very anomie and Franklin for your help