sed & protobuf: need to delete dots

Question

I need to delete dots using sed, but not all dots.

- repeated .CBroadcast_GetBroadcastChatUserNames_Response.PersonaName persona_names = 1
+ repeated CBroadcast_GetBroadcastChatUserNames_Response.PersonaName persona_names = 1

Here the dot after repeated, (repeated also can beoptional | required | extend) should be deleted

- rpc NotifyBroadcastViewerState (.CBroadcast_BroadcastViewerState_Notification) returns (.NoResponse)
+ rpc NotifyBroadcastViewerState (CBroadcast_BroadcastViewerState_Notification) returns (NoResponse)

And here delete dot after (

It should work on multiple files with different content.

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Full code can be found here

Answer 1

A perhaps simpler solution (works with both GNU sed and BSD/macOS sed):

sed -E 's/([[:space:][:punct:]])\./\1/g' file

^{In case a . can also appear as the first character on a line, use the following varation:
sed -E 's/(^|[[:space:][:punct:]])\./\1/g' file}

The assumption is that any . preceded by:

• a whitespace character (character class [:space:])
  • as in:  .
• or a punctuation character (character class [:punct:])
  • as in: (.

should be removed, by replacing the matched sequence with just the character preceding the ., captured via subexpression (...) in the regular expression, and referenced in the replacement string with \1 (the first capture group).

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If you invert the logic, you can try the simpler:

sed -E 's/([^[:alnum:]])\./\1/g' file

^{In case a . can also appear as the first character on a line:
sed -E 's/(^|[^[:alnum:]])\./\1/g' file}

This replaces all periods that are not (^) preceded by an alphanumeric character (a letter or digit).