Sed translation of octal characters

[thinairtraveler]

I'm trying to clean up a DB load file. The file contains a delimiter sequence of '|~' and I need to change it to \265 (the micro symbol).

XBFTFieldDelim="|~"
fieldDelim="\265"

sed -e "s/$XBFTFieldDelim/$fieldDelim/g" data.load


The error I'm getting is:
sed: -e expression #1, char 11: Invalid reference \2 on `s' command's RHS

I've tried a lot variations on the command with no success.

No one at work will give me any help.

Mark

[wje_lf]

This is in a bash script, right?

#!/bin/bash

XBFTFieldDelim="|~"
fieldDelim=$(echo -e "\xb5")

sed -e "s/$XBFTFieldDelim/$fieldDelim/g" data.load

Hope this helps.

[ghostdog74]

if you have fields and field delimiters, its easier to work with them using awk

awk 'BEGIN{FS="[|][~]"}{$1=$1}1' OFS="\265" file

[thinairtraveler]

Thanks Bill, that worked. I tried something similar to that a few weeks ago, but obviously I did not do it right.

ghostdog74, I did not try the awk code since there are 3 different delimiters that require changing. The sed route seemed to be the most direct at my stage of understanding. I'll put down awk for more studying next month once project work eases up.

Mark