Using Regular Expressions to find unwanted characters

professorfrink · 10-07-2003, 11:02 AM

Hello everyone,

I have a large file, well large enough that I don't want to manually comb through it, and need to find any lines that have an invalid character in it.

That valid characters are digits, letters (case insensitive), { , } , and spaces.

I am having trouble writing a reg expr to use with grep to find lines containing anything but those characters.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

SaTaN · 10-07-2003, 01:34 PM

Code:

 
grep -v -E "^([a-z]|[0-9]|[A-Z]|{|}| |   )+$" file

The last two in the or expression are for spaces and tabs....

If you are in bash then go to visual mode ("CTRL+v") then press tab...

Hope that this is all that you want ....
Feel free to ask me if there is any problem

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