[gnaritas]

All of your suggestions are more complicated than what you're suggesting replacing. People chain simple commands together because they're a language and it matches how they think of the problem. They're solving the problem with simple commands and pipes, you're trying to solve it with regex and as few commands as possible. All ways are valid but specific commands tend to be easier to remember on the fly than trying to do it all with sed and regexes. I use sed when I want to edit streams, not when I want to filter them. Tr is a simpler replace than a sed regex.