Given:

~$ cat .test-profile export [email protected] export MONGODB_URI='mongodb+srv://administrator:[email protected]/test?retryWrites=true&w=majority' 

I wrote the following shell script to replace the variable values:

BASH_PROFILE="$HOME/.test-profile" MONGODB_URI="mongodb+srv://administrator:[email protected]/mysite_development?retryWrites=true&w=majority" INSERT_ENV_VAR () { if [[ -z "$2" ]] then echo "Failed to retrieve $1" else if grep -q "$1" "$BASH_PROFILE"; then # Cannot use / delimiter, for value can contain / sed -in -E "s|(export $1=)[a-zA-Z0-9@.:\/=&\-\?\+]+|\1$2|g" "$BASH_PROFILE" else echo "export $1=$2" >> "$BASH_PROFILE" fi fi } INSERT_ENV_VAR 'ADMIN_EMAIL' '[email protected]' INSERT_ENV_VAR 'MONGODB_URI' $MONGODB_URI 

While the ADMIN_EMAIL variable is replaced fine, the MONGODB_URI variable is not being replaced. And I believe it has to do something with the character class [] inside of the regex. But I am not sure what. I tried it in a programming language like ruby and it found the match. But with sed it isn't finding the match. Why?

This is what I expect .test-profile to look like afterwards:

export [email protected] export MONGODB_URI='mongodb+srv://administrator:[email protected]/mysite_development?retryWrites=true&w=majority' 

Notice 'mysite_development' replaces 'test'.