Using sed with backreference as the replacement pattern
Tinkering with sed, I have manage to try using regular expressions using backreferences using the most common \N where N is the number of position inside the parenthesis. Searches and replaces the zoo.color to zoo['color'] or zoo.animals to zoo['animals']: cat zoo.js | sed -E "s/(zoo)(\.)([a-zA-Z0-9]*)/\1['\3']/g"|less \1 = is the characters inside the first parenthesis w/c is the zoo \3 = is the characters inside the third parenthesis which involves alpha-numeric -E will interpret as regular expressions as extended (modern) regular expressions rather than basic regular expressions (BRE's) Another example, you can use this for replacing such a string let say, in a SQL statement, example SQL string: CREATE DEFINER=`mysqluser`@`%` FUNCTION `total`(cost DOUBLE, income DOUBLE, lng2 DOUBLE) RETURNS double And you wanted to remove DEFINER=`mysqluser`@`%` and allow FUNCTION to be a dynamic string so you'll just need to catch tha...