Does . really match any character?

Question

I am using a very simple sed script removing comments : sed -e 's/--.*$//'

It works great until non-ascii characters are present in a comment, e.g.: -- °. This line does not match the regular expression and is not substituted.

Any idea how to get . to really match any character?

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Solution :

Since file says it is an iso8859 text, LANG variable environment must be changed before calling sed : LANG=iso8859 sed -e 's/--.*//' -

Answer 1

It works for me. It's probably a character encoding problem.

This might help:

• Why does sed fail with International characters and how to fix?
• http://www.barregren.se/blog/how-use-sed-together-utf8