Use separator other than / in sed

Question

I want to use sed on some text that contains backslashes, and want to avoid lots of escaped \/ characters.

How can I change the delimiter or separator character to be other than /?

Answer 1

In GNU sed, simply swap out the / for the character you wish to use:

% echo /// | sed 's_/_x_g' 
xxx

\ can also be used, and must not be escaped (it fails when escaped as \\):

% echo xxx | sed 's\x\y\g'
yyy