Ygtjki

Taking the bash answer of @Serg and converting it to use bash builtins, rather than 2 or 3 processes per line. Processes are cheap but not free!

#!/bin/bash
# Use shell builtins, read, true, false, printf
flag=false
while IFS= read -r line
do
 case "$line" in
 (*"("*) flag=true ;;
 esac

 if $flag
 then
 line=$line//line/newline 
 fi

 printf "%sn" "$line"

 case "$line" in
 (*")"*) flag=false ;;
 esac

done < "$1"

If perl solution is okay and file is small enough to be processed as a whole:

$ perl -0777 -pe 's/([^)]+)/$&=~s|line|newline|gr/ge' ip.txt 
myFunction (newline0

newline1

newline2

newline3

newline4) 

• 
  -0777 slurp entire input file


• 
  ([^)]+) pattern to match - ( followed by non ) characters and ending with )
  


• 
  $&=~s|line|newline|gr the matched pattern is referenced here using $& and the desired replacement (line to newline) is done. Note the r flag to return the result as the replacement string


• 
  e flag allows to use expression instead of string


• use perl -i -0777 -pe for inplace editing

For the question and data as originally presented, a sed 1-liner works

 sed '/(/,/)/s/line/newline/g'

which says for each region that starts with a line containing an ( and ends with a line containing a ')', substitute globally line for newline. Remove the g if you only want to change the first line on an input line.

For the modified question,

 sed -e '/(/' -e ':loop;s/(.*)/()/;t;N;b loop' -e ''

works. It loops over the input,printing it until it finds a (. At this point it tries to change everything inside a ( ) pair including the delimiters to just (). If this succeeds it breaks out of the loop, prints the result and continues. If it didn't manage to do so, usually because it hasn't yet seen the ), it appends the next input line and continues the loop. If you don't want it on one line then writing it as

sed -e '/(/
:loop
s/(.*)/()/
t
N
b loop
'

makes it easier to follow.

awk '
 function mysub(str) 
 if (str) gsub(/line/, "newline", str); return str
 
 BEGIN 
 OFS=FS="("
 
 NF>1 
 if (FS=="(") 
 print $1,mysub($2); OFS=FS=")"
 else 
 print mysub($1),$2; OFS=FS="("
 
 next
 
 
 print FS=="(" ? $0 : mysub($0)
 ' /path/to/input

The custom function mysub is where you do the replacements you want to do between the parentheses. The assumption is that parentheses aren't nested.

There are two states, inside and outside the parentheses.

• Outside (the starting state), the input and output separator is set to the opening parenthesis (OFS=FS="(").


• Once it comes across a line with more than one field separated by the input separator (NF>1) and…
  
  
  • …you are currently in the outside mode (FS=="("), everything before and after the field separator is outputted (with the output separator in-between) but with latter going through the replacement function (mysub($2)) and then the the mode is flipped by changing the input and output separators (OFS=FS=")"),
  
  
  • …otherwise (else), you are in inside mode, and everything before and after the field separator is outputted but this time with former going through the replacement function (mysub($1)) and the mode flips here as well.
  
  


• On all other lines, the whole line is outputted unchanged if outside (FS=="(") or otherwise goes as a whole through the replacement function (mysub($0)).

awk 'function m(s)gsub(/line/,"newline",s);return sBEGINOFS=FS="("NF>1if(FS=="(")print $1,m($2);OFS=FS=")"elseprint m($1),$2;OFS=FS="("nextprint FS=="("?$0:m($0)' /path/to/input

line96
line97 myFunction (line0

line1

line2

line3

line4) line98
line99

line96
line97 myFunction (newline0

newline1

newline2

newline3

newline4) line98
line99

awk '
 BEGIN 
 OFS=FS="("
 
 NF>1 
 if (FS=="(") 
 print $1,""; OFS=FS=")"
 else 
 print "",$2; OFS=FS="("
 
 next
 
 FS=="("' /path/to/input

line96
line97 myFunction (
) line98
line99

Combining all the clarifications, comments and revised data, my offer would be like bellow.

First of all lets consider a source file d.txt containing your advised myFunction (...) plus one more function to be more realistic.

To be on the hard side lets suppose that those two functions in this d.txt file have almost identical contents, like this:

$ cat d.txt
myOtherFunction (x as boolean
y as integer
d as string
e as whatever)

myFunction (xx as boolean
yy as integer
dd as string
ee as whatever)

Lets suppose now that in another file d2.txt we have a different function.

$ cat d2.txt
BrandNewFunction (xxx as integer
yyy as boolean
ddd as integer
eee as whatever)

Forgetting the sample names of line, newline , etc , and considering your comments it seems that what you really want is to replace in your initial source code file d.txt the existing myFunction (..) with the BrandNewFunction (...) present in file d2.txt.

This can be done easily using pure bash:

$ a="$(sed -n '/myFunction (/,/)/p' d.txt)" #isolates myFunction from the source file d.txt
$ b="$(cat d2.txt)" #get contents of file d2.txt (BrandNewFunction)
$ c="$(cat d.txt)" #get the whole source file d.txt
$ echo "$c/$a/$b" #in source file d.txt ($c) replace $a with $b (d2.txt)
#Output:
myOtherFunction (x as boolean
y as integer
d as string
e as whatever)

BrandNewFunction (xxx as integer
yyy as boolean
ddd as integer
eee as whatever)

Or even as one-liner:

$ a="$(sed -n '/myFunction (/,/)/p' d.txt)";b="$(cat d2.txt)";c="$(cat d.txt)";echo "$c/$a/$b"

Above command just prints on your screen the replacement results (echo). To save the results just send echo to >d.txt for overwritting the existing file or even a new file if you like.

Sed seems not to be quite good to replace multiple lines separated by newlines, since it is focused on line operations.

AWK should be good for the job, but i'm not good in AWK.

Bash is the easiest solution, which can successfully replace multilines.

PS1: If file d2.txt contains more functions and you want to isolate the BrandNewFunction (..), similarly to source file d.txt you just need to modify the $b variable definition like this:

$ b="$(sed -n '/BrandNewFunction (/,/)/p' d2.txt)"

PS2: If you just want to replace myFunction (...) of source file d.txt with a blank function of the same name, you can just hardcode variable b like this (you know already which function from source file d.txt you want to delete, right?)

$ b="myFunction ( )" 

If you also want to process nested parenthesis correctly, use a tool for a context-free language instead of a regular language, for example sgrep:

sgrep -o '%r ' '(start .. end) extracting ("("__")")' < input_file

This way, for example, the following

myFunction (line0

line1

(line2)

line3

line4) 

anotherFun (x y)

becomes

myFunction ( ) 

anotherFun ( )

A new version of GNU sed supports the -z option.

Normally, sed reads a line by reading a string of characters up to the end-of-line character (new line or carriage return).

The GNU version of sed added a feature in version 4.2.2 to use the "NULL" character instead. This can be useful if you have files that use the NULL as a record separator. Some GNU utilities can genertae output that uses a NULL instead a new line, such as "find . -print0" or "grep -lZ".

You can use this option when you want sed to work over different lines.

sed -z 's/([^)]*)/( )/g' inputfile