ksed

Apply sed-style substitutions to the human-readable text inside any supported format, then write the document back in the same format. Only the editable text changes — a .docx keeps its styles, a JSON catalog keeps its keys and shape.

ksed [flags] SCRIPT [FILE...]

SCRIPT is a substitution command, s/regexp/replacement/flags:

• Any single-byte delimiter works, so s|a|b| is equivalent to s/a/b/ — handy when the text contains slashes.
• The g flag replaces every match in a block (otherwise only the first); the i flag makes the match case-insensitive.
• Replacements support backreferences \1…\9 and & for the whole match.
• Pass several substitutions with repeated -e.

By default the edited document is written to standard output, like sed. Use -i to edit files in place, optionally keeping a backup (-i.bak). With no file, or when the file is -, standard input is read.

Examples

# Normalise spelling across a Markdown guide (to stdout)
ksed 's/colour/color/g' guide.md

# Rebrand in place across every Word document
ksed -i 's/Inc\./LLC/' *.docx

# Two substitutions, keeping a .bak backup of each file
ksed -i.bak -e 's/v1/v2/g' -e 's/beta//' locales/en.json

# Edit the French translations rather than the source
ksed --target fr 's/Bonjour/Salut/g' messages.xliff

# Reorder with backreferences
ksed 's/(\w+), (\w+)/\2 \1/' names.txt

Options

Flag	Meaning
-e, --expression SCRIPT	Add a substitution script (repeatable).
-i, --in-place[=SUFFIX]	Edit files in place; append a backup SUFFIX if given (e.g. -i.bak).
--target LOCALE	Edit the translation for LOCALE instead of the source.
-f, --format	Override format detection (e.g. -f json).
--source-lang	Source language (default en).
--encoding	Input/output encoding (default UTF-8).

Faithful round-trips

ksed reuses kapi's reader/writer pipeline, so editing a structured format and writing it back preserves everything that is not the edited text. For formats with a skeleton — Office Open XML among them — the document's structure, styles and non-translatable content round-trip unchanged; the fidelity is semantic (the same text and structure), not a byte-for-byte copy. Only the s/// substitution command is supported; compose multiple with -e.

Inline formatting within a block is preserved as well. The pattern matches the block's text with its inline codes removed, so a substitution can span a bold or linked span — s/Hello world/Hi/ matches even when world is bold. Editing a word inside a <b> span keeps the span around the new word.

When an edit removes the text a code applied to, what happens depends on whether the code is deletable — the same vocabulary constraint the QA checks use (see Inline Formatting). A deletable formatting span (bold, italic, a link) that is emptied collapses — ksed will not leave an empty <b></b>. A non-deletable code (a line break, a variable, a placeholder, a subblock reference) is always kept, even when the text around it is replaced.