regex - Replacing caret characters with sed

Question

I have lines in a file that look like this:

FA General,1234567^^^^^FA Student Letter- General^<<undefined>>^\pathofile.RTF

I'm trying to use sed to replace the caret characters with commas. If I use:

sed 's/^/,/' file.txt

Nothing changes. I've also tried

sed 's/\^/,/' file.txt
sed 's/^^/,/' file.txt

What am I missing here?

Answer 1

Do you want to replace all carets? I am sure if you look closely at your result you'll see that the first caret is replaced. So try this:

sed -e 's/^/,/g' file.txt

Note the g to mean global replace, i.e, all matches.