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Can I use grep to find two words near each other?

Is there a way to use grep to search a text document to find two words that are -say- within four lines of each other?

I'm sure it's possible to build a regular expression that finds two words within 4 lines of each other ... word1(.*\n){0,4}word2 would be my starting point (not tested, needs some work)

But I think grep is only capable of matching single lines at a time, so with grep itself, no.

What do you need to achieve?

Hi.

See:

Code:

glark - Search text files for complex regular expressions

...

          -a NUM expr1 expr2

          --and NUM expr1 expr2

          --and=NUM expr1 expr2

          ( expr1 --and=NUM expr2 )

              Match both of the two expressions, within NUM lines of each

              other. 

...

-- excerpt from man glark

It was in Debian repository, but can also be found at: http://www.incava.org/projects/glark/

Best wishes ... cheers, makyo

Quote:

Originally Posted by walterbyrd (Post 4546065)

Is there a way to use grep to search a text document to find two words that are -say- within four lines of each other?

probably

Code:

grep -n -i -A4 -B4 PATTERN1 /path/to/file |grep -E 'PATTERN1|PATTERN2'

Hi.

Displaying the context, the synthetic data file, and results:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/env bash



# @(#) s1        Demonstrate match within 4 lines, glark, grep.



# Utility functions: print-as-echo, print-line-with-visual-space, debug.

# export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin"

pe() { for _i;do printf "%s" "$_i";done; printf "\n"; }

pl() { pe;pe "-----" ;pe "$*"; }

db() { ( printf " db, ";for _i;do printf "%s" "$_i";done;printf "\n" ) >&2 ; }

db() { : ; }

C=$HOME/bin/context && [ -f $C ] && $C glark grep



FILE=${1-data1}



pl " Input data file $FILE:"

cat $FILE



pl " Results, glark:"

glark --no-line-number --no-highlight -a 4 "x" "y" $FILE



pl " Results, grep:"

grep -n -i -A4 -B4 "x" data1 |grep -E 'x|y'



exit 0

producing:

Code:

% ./s1



Environment: LC_ALL = C, LANG = C

(Versions displayed with local utility "version")

OS, ker|rel, machine: Linux, 2.6.26-2-amd64, x86_64

Distribution        : Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.8 (lenny) 

GNU bash 3.2.39

glark, version 1.8.0

GNU grep 2.5.3



-----

 Input data file data1:

x y 0

s1

s2

s3

s4

s5

x 1

y

s1

s2

s3

s4

s5

h

x 2

1

y

s1

s2

s3

s4

s5

x 3

1

2

y

s1

s2

s3

s4

s5

x 4

1

2

3

y

s1

s2

s3

s4

s5

x 5

1

2

3

4

y

s1

s2

s3

s4

s5

y 1

x



-----

 Results, glark:

x y 0

x 1

y

x 2

1

y

x 3

1

2

y

x 4

1

2

3

y

y 1

x



-----

 Results, grep:

1:x y 0

7:x 1

8-y

15:x 2

17-y

23:x 3

26-y

32:x 4

36-y

42:x 5

53-y 1

54:x

Best wishes ... cheers, makyo