Is it possible to replace half or x characters of a matched group?
I have had a request for a partial email capturing, so something like [email protected] becomes ***mple123@***def.com
I can do this if the characters before and after the @ are 3 characters long,
([^|@]{0,3})([^]{0,3})
This captures [email protected] perfectly and I can substitute for ***@***.com but if it's over 3 characters long on each end, for instance [email protected] it becomes ******[email protected]
The other way I can see is capture everything until the @ and everything to the . but then this won't be a partial capture. Is this possible?
1 Answer
You can use
sed -E 's/^[^@]{0,3}|(@)[^.]{0,3}/\1***/g' Details
-E- enables the POSIX ERE syntax that does not require too much escaping here^[^@]{0,3}- zero to three occurrences of any char other than a@at the start of the string|- or(@)- Group 1: a@char[^.]{0,3}- zero to three occurrences of any char other than a.\1***replaces with Group 1 value +***.
