Using egrep

Barbarian · 02-15-2002, 02:27 AM

I've just starting fiddling with regular expressions and thought I understood enough of the basics to try a few test routines. However, I seem to be stuck on whitespaces.

I've tried the following command:-

egrep -i 'head.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+;' test.me,v

Ok, the present version will match any character after the head, but I can't seem to get it to match on a tab or space. I've tried {:space:], ( |\t)+, \t+ etc.. Why can't I match on the flipping tab? I can't see what I'm doing wrong.

Barbarian · 02-18-2002, 01:57 AM

In answer to my own question, it appears that egrep doesn't support the shorthand metacharacters (which is a bit of a shame)

Malicious · 02-18-2002, 04:16 PM

I think that you will find that egrep and fgrep are symbolic links to grep. Try using grep -E and see if your results are different. The program is supposed to figure out which path executed it and set option -E for egrep and -F for fgrep. It might be broken.

Barbarian · 02-20-2002, 02:41 AM

Thanks for the information but I've finally managed to come up with a solution by piping a generic grep to awk which does support the full range of metacharacters. It was a real pain and hardly an ideal solution, but hey, it works!

In the end I used something like:-

grep "head" $lListFile | awk '/head( |\t)+[0-9]+(\.[0-9])*;/ { sub(/;/, " ") ; print $2 }'

Any of you clever types out there know any different?

Silly22 · 10-18-2002, 05:42 PM

In another post,
neo77777 says

Quote:

Well awk recognizes word delimiters - spaces, tabs. So I pipe the output of grep to the awk

That thread is:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...752#post126752

I myself prefer using vim scripts. It has a very complex regular expressions searching. I've never tried piping to vim; instead, I just pipe to a file and let vim work on the file.

And another solution for spaces using grep at the shell is as follows.

For example:

whatever output | grep -Ee " "*.*" "*[1-9]{1}[0-9]*

the search string for 0 to many spaces is " "*
A quote followed by a space followed by a quote optionally followed by a repetition operator.

leed_25 · 10-20-2002, 02:54 PM

what happens if you put an actual space character or tab character in the list? it works for me.