How to pass a variable in sed command

Question

I have declared a variable: username=user2

the contents of the test json is as follows: { "name": "user1", "city": "Texas" }

I would like to replace the value of name i.e user1 with a variable username I tried the following command: sed -i 's/"name": "user1"/"name": $username/g'

The output was:

{ "name": $username, "city": "Texas" }

Expected Output is:

{ "name": "user2", "city": "Texas" }

How can this be achieved? Thanks in Advance

Answer 1

Do it with jq:

jq -c --arg name "$username"  '.name = $name'

Assuming your input data is exactly as you specified, then the following example works with GNU sed:

sed -E 's/("name"\s*:\s*)"[^"]+"/\1"'"$username"'"/'