Comment by reacweb

There are a collection of use cases where sed and awk (and bash) are perfect tools. IMHO, the best advice is to switch to a real scripting language (like perl or python) as soon as the complexity increases. This way you never need to learn in detail all the intricacies of these tools. You just need to know the small use cases and to master your favorite scripting language. The life is too short and too many interesting domains exists to lose time mastering the quirks or sed, awk and bash. Real scripting languages do not have so many quirks and limitations. This helps to produce less buggy software. Time is precious, choose what you want to learn.