sed string replacements

[Scott Haneda]

Hi everyone, I am sort of at the end of my wits here, and after a few hours of trying this on my own, I am stumped.  This leans on being OT, however, it will be used exclusively in helping me with cleaning up a bunch of documentation to a project, which I will then be making a Portfile for.

I don't think it is appropriate to reinplace the docs as it is going to add a ton of noise to the Portfile, and be something that is done once in a while by the developer.  I am just working to help the developer keep his documentation up to date and in a form that is beneficial to the user.

I feel it best to keep this cruft removal out of the Portfile and start with clean files.

The problem is basic string replacement with variables, here is a hugely simplified version of the problem...

    $cat VERSION.header
    # Version:     0.0
    # Author:      Example <user at example.com>
    # Created:     06/18/2010

    $cat DOCUMENTATION
    _VERSION_HEADER_
    
    Hello, this is the documentation file, there will be other strings in it
    such as _TOKEN_ and _OTHER_TOKEN_, which will go on for an arbitrary amount.


The end result of the file DOCUMENTATION should look like this:
    $cat DOCUMENTATION
    # Version:     0.0
    # Author:      Example <user at example.com>
    # Created:     06/18/2010
    
    Hello, this is the documentation file, there will be other strings in it
    such as download link and download2, which will go on for an arbitrary amount.


Here is my pseudo example, where I have run into issues of loosing the line endings and the replacements simply not happening.  The below of course will not work at all, but I feel it illustrates well what it is I am trying to do.  Does the Mac OS X sed behave different than the version that most examples I find online are referring to?

    VERSION_HEADER=`cat VERSION.header`
    DOWNLOAD='download link'
    ALT_DOWNLOAD='download2'
    
    sed -e '/_VERSION_HEADER_/$VERSION_HEADER' DOCUMENTATION
    sed -e '/_TOKEN_/$DOWNLOAD' DOCUMENTATION
    sed -e '/_OTHER_TOKEN_/$ALT_DOWNLOAD' DOCUMENTATION
    
Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks so much. 

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