Transform snake_case to camelCase with sed

Question

I want to convert my_long_variable to myLongVariable in sed.

This works:

echo "my_long_variable" | sed -r 's/(^|_)([a-z])/\U\2/g' | sed -r 's/^(.)/\l\1/g'

Is there a more elegant way to do that with sed?

Answer 1

First of all, prefer -E to -r; it's more portable.

However, since you're using the \U GNU extension in any case, this isn't that crucial.

Second, I assume echo is a stand-in for a more complex command. If there is in fact no complex command, consider using a Here String or a Here Doc instead.

Crucially, you don't need to fire up two Sed processes just to run two Sed commands. Sed is a complete programming language in itself. Just separate the two commands with a semicolon: sed 's/foo/bar/;s/frip/baz/'

However, in this case you don't even need that, because you only need a single substitution.

sed -E 's/_([a-z])/\U\1/g' <<< my_long_variable

---

There is another aspect here. You shouldn't often need to change case in scripts (and certainly not in Bash). But if you're doing this in your editor, you should use vi rather than a Bash script for the editing. \U and its relatives are standard features of vi, though not of Sed.

So within vi, on a line of text containing only the variable name, you can use:

:s/_\([a-z]\)/\U\1/g

This is portable (POSIX compliant) and will work on any system that has vi, even the most minimal implementation.

Answer 2

Why try to match for (^|_)? You are anyway modifying it at the end, so just skip the first character entirely:

echo "my_long_variable" | sed -r 's/_([a-z])/\U\1/gi' | sed -r 's/^([A-Z])/\l\1/'

The above pattern will take care of cases where you start with:

Some_var_Iable

Answer 3

In addition to the other good suggestions, don't pipe sed to another invocation of sed, use a semi-colon to separate multiple commands.

Also you might want to make your toCamelCase method more generic, e.g.

echo "Something_with-a bit_of Variety" | sed -E 's/[ _-]([a-z])/\U\1/gi;s/^([A-Z])/\l\1/'

outputs

somethingWithABitOfVariety

or even

echo "Something & some_special! chars" | sed -E 's/[^a-z]+([a-z])/\U\1/gi;s/^([A-Z])/\l\1/'

outputs

somethingSomeSpecialChars