How to wrap a string containing a character with a tag?

Question

Hi I'm a Linux noob and I'd to know how to replace a line starting with "/" with tag.
Here's an example:

/Foo is awesome

and I would like to get

<i>Foo is awesome</i>

I would appreciate any help!

Answer 1

You could use awk with substr like this:

awk '/^\//{$0 = "<i>" substr($0,2) "</i>"}1' file

When there is a / at the start of the line, append the tags and use substr to remove the slash from the original line. 1 is true so awk does the default action for each line, which is to print the line.