Escape < and > in sed/shell

Question

How do I escape '<' and '>' character in sed.

I have some xml files which needs some text between the tags to be replaced. How do I escape the '>' and '<' characters.

The problem with > and < is it has special meaning in the shell to redirect the output to a file. So backslash doesn't work.

Answer 1

Ok. Found out by myself. Use quotes.

$ sed -i "s/>foo</>bar</g" file

Answer 2

Just put a backslash before them or enclose them in single or double quotes. On second thought, your question I think needs to be more clear. Are you trying to use sed to process an XML file and you want to get what's between a tag? Then you want:

sed -re 's@(<TAG.*?>).*?(</TAG>)@\1hi\2@' test.xml

Answer 3

Escape them with backslash