I read 97 fictional novels this year, including re-reads. Most of them were fantasy, rest would fall under sci-fi and magical realism.

A few years back, I would finish a book no matter how difficult or boring it was. Not so anymore, I had at least two DNF this year — one was too dark for my tastes and the other was too boring.

Picking favorites is a tough task and choosing the order of presentation even more so. I've gone with books I enjoyed the most and these are all great candidates for future re-reads. I am not so good with rating prose, characters, worldbuilding, plot holes, etc anyway.

This post shows how you can use ripgrep, perl and sd to perform multiline fixed string search and replace operations from the command line. Solution with GNU sed is also discussed, along with its limitations.

This stackoverflow Q&A got me thinking about various ways to construct a solution in GNU sed if lookarounds are needed.

Only single line (with newline as the line separator) processing is presented here. Equivalent lookaround syntax with grep -P or perl is also shown for comparison. Cases where multiple lines and/or ASCII NUL characters are present in the pattern space is left as an exercise.

ripgrep (command name rg) is a grep tool, but supports search and replace as well. rg is far from a like-for-like alternate for sed, but it has nifty features like multiline replacement, fixed string matching, PCRE2 support, etc. This post gives an overview of syntax for substitution and highlights some of the cases where rg is a handy replacement for sed.