[SOLVED] Replace double quotes that come in pairs

Issue

I'd like to replace double quotes " characters which come in pairs. Let me explain what I mean.

"Some sentence"

Here double quotes should be replaced because they come in pair.

"Some sentence

Here should not be replaced - there is no matching pair for the first quote character.

I'd like to replace first quote character with „.

❯ echo „ |hexdump -C
00000000  e2 80 9e 0a

And the second quote character with ”

❯ echo ” |hexdump -C
00000000  e2 80 9d 0a

Summing it up, the following:

Hi, "how
are you"

Should be the following after being replacement is made.

Hi, „how
are you”

I've come up with the following code, but it fails to work: 'sed -r s/(\")(.+)(\")/\1\xe2\x80\x9e\3\xe2\x80\x9d/g'

" hi " gives "„"”.

EDIT As requested in the comments, here comes a sample from a file to be modified. Important note: the file is structured - perhaps it may help. The file is always a srt file, i.e. movie subtitle format.

104
00:10:25,332 --> 00:10:27,876
Kobieta mówi do drugiej:
"Widzisz to, co ja?"

105
00:10:28,001 --> 00:10:30,904
A tamta: "No to co?
Każdy wygląda tak samo."

Solution

sed -rn ':a;s/"([^"]*)"/„\1”/g;/"/!{p;b;};$p;N;ba'

It substitutes all "xx" with „xx”. If the result contains no more " it is printed and we restart with next line. Else we concatenate the next line and we restart. The $p is just here to print the last lines if they contain a dangling ".

Answered By - Renaud Pacalet

Answer Checked By - Cary Denson (WPSolving Admin)