I have a input file such as
file;14;19;;;hello 2019
file2;2019;2020;;;this is a test 2020
file3;25;31;this is a number 31
I would like to grep numbers only after ;;;. For example if I wanted to grep 2019 it would give me
file;14;19;;;hello 2019
instead of if I did grep '2019' file
file;14;19;;;hello 2019
file2;2019;2020;;;this is a test 2020
How can I accomplish this task?
Regular expression can include stuff other than fixed text, it sounds like all you need is:
grep ';;;.*[0-9]' inputFile.txt
This will deliver all lines that have the text ;;; followed by a digit somewhere after that in the line. In terms of explanation:
;;; is the literal text, three semicolons;
.* is zero or more of any character;
[0-9] is any digit.
That will give you lines with any number. If you want a specific number, use that for the final bullet point above.
Just keep in mind that this will also give you the line xyzzy ;;; 920194 if you go looking for 2019.
If you want just the 2019 numbers (i.e., without any digits on either side), you can use the zero-width negative look-behind and look-ahead assertions, assuming your version of grep has Perl-compatible regular expressions (PCRE, which GNU grep does with the -P flag):
grep -P ';;;.*(?<![0-9])2019(?![0-9])' inputFile.txt
This can be read as:
;;; is the literal text, three semicolons;
.* is zero or more of any character;
(?<![0-9]) means next match cannot be preceded by a digit;
2019 is the number you're looking for;
(?![0-9]) means previous match cannot be followed by a digit.
Use this Perl one-liner:
perl -F';' -lane 'print if $F[-1] =~ /2019/' in_file
Example:
( echo 'file;14;19;;;hello 2019' ; echo 'file2;2019;2020;;;this is a test 2020' ) | perl -F';' -lane 'print if $F[-1] =~ /2019/'
Prints:
file;14;19;;;hello 2019
The Perl one-liner uses these command line flags:
-e : Tells Perl to look for code in-line, instead of in a file.
-n : Loop over the input one line at a time, assigning it to $_ by default.
-l : Strip the input line separator ("\n" on *NIX by default) before executing the code in-line, and append it when printing.
-a : Split $_ into array #F on whitespace or on the regex specified in -F option.
-F';' : Split into #F on semicolon (;), rather than on whitespace.
$F[-1] : the last element of the array #F = the last element of the input line split on semicolon. Alternatively, use $F[5] (the 6th element - the arrays are 0-indexed), if you need to count from the left.
SEE ALSO:
perldoc perlrun: how to execute the Perl interpreter: command line switches
Related
I have a text file using markup language (similar to wikipedia articles)
cat test.txt
This is a sample text having: colon in the text. and there is more [[in single or double: brackets]]. I need to select the first word only.
and second line with no [brackets] colon in it.
I need to select the word "having:" only because that is part of regular text. I tried
grep -v '[*:*]' test.txt
This will correctly avoid the tags, but does not select the expected word.
The square brackets specify a character class, so your regular expression looks for any occurrence of one of the characters * or : (or *, but we said that already, didn't we?)
grep has the option -o to only print the matching text, so something lie
grep -ow '[^[:space:]]*:[^[:space:]]*' file.txt
would extract any text with a colon in it, surrounded by zero or more non-whitespace characters on each side. The -w option adds the condition that the match needs to be between word boundaries.
However, if you want to restrict in which context you want to match the text, you will probably need to switch to a more capable tool than plain grep. For example, you could use sed to preprocess each line to remove any bracketed text, and then look for matches in the remaining text.
sed -e 's/\[.*]//g' -e 's/ [^: ]*$/ /' -e 's/[^: ]* //g' -e 's/ /\n/' file.txt
(This assumes that your sed recognizes \n in the replacement string as a literal newline. There are simple workarounds available if it doesn't, but let's not go there if it's not necessary.)
In brief, we first replace any text between square brackets. (This needs to be improved if your input could contain multiple sequences of square brackets on a line with normal text between them. Your example only shows nested square brackets, but my approach is probably too simple for either case.) Then, we remove any words which don't contain a colon, with a special provision for the last word on the line, and some subsequent cleanup. Finally, we replace any remaining spaces with newlines, and (implicitly) print whatever is left. (This still ends up printing one newline too many, but that is easy to fix up later.)
Alternatively, we could use sed to remove any bracketed expressions, then use grep on the remaining tokens.
sed -e :a -e 's/\[[^][]*\]//' -e ta file.txt |
grep -ow '[^[:space:]]*:[^[:space:]]*'
The :a creates a label a and ta says to jump back to that label and try again if the regex matched. This one also demonstrates how to handle nested and repeated brackets. (I suppose it could be refactored into the previous attempt, so we could avoid the pipe to grep. But outlining different solution models is also useful here, I suppose.)
If you wanted to ensure that there is at least one non-colon character adjacent to the colon, you could do something like
... file.txt |
grep -owE '[^:[:space:]]+:[^[:space:]]*|[^[:space:]]*:[^: [:space:]]+'
where the -E option selects a slightly more modern regex dialect which allows us to use | between alternatives and + for one or more repetitions. (Basic grep in 1969 did not have these features at all; much later, the POSIX standard grafted them on with a slightly wacky syntax which requires you to backslash them to remove the literal meaning and select the metacharacter behavior... but let's not go there.)
Notice also how [^:[:space:]] matches a single character which is not a colon or a whitespace character, where [:space:] is the (slightly arcane) special POSIX named character class which matches any whitespace character (regular space, horizontal tab, vertical tab, possibly Unicode whitespace characters, depending on locale).
Awk easily lets you iterate over the tokens on a line. The requirement to ignore matches within square brackets complicates matters somewhat; you could keep a separate variable to keep track of whether you are inside brackets or not.
awk '{ for(i=1; i<=NF; ++i) {
if($i ~ /\]/) { brackets=0; next }
if($i ~ /\[/) brackets=1;
if(brackets) next;
if($i ~ /:/) print $i }' file.txt
This again hard-codes some perhaps incorrect assumptions about how the brackets can be placed. It will behave unexpectedly if a single token contains a closing square bracket followed by an opening one, and has an oversimplified treatment of nested brackets (the first closing bracket after a series of opening brackets will effectively assume we are no longer inside brackets).
A combined solution using sed and awk:
sed 's/ /\n/g' test.txt | gawk 'i==0 && $0~/:$/{ print $0 }/\[/{ i++} /\]/ {i--}'
sed will change all spaces to a newline
awk (or gawk) will output all lines matching $0~/:$/, as long as i equals zero
The last part of the awk stuff keeps a count of the opening and closing brackets.
Another solution using sed and grep:
sed -r -e 's/\[.*\]+//g' -e 's/ /\n/g' test.txt | grep ':$'
's/\[.*\]+//g' will filter the stuff between brackets
's/ /\n/g' will replace a space with a newline
grep will only find lines ending with :
A third on using only awk:
gawk '{ for (t=1;t<=NF;t++){
if(i==0 && $t~/:$/) print $t;
i=i+gsub(/\[/,"",$t)-gsub(/\]/,"",$t) }}' test.txt
gsub returns the number of replacements.
The variable i is used to count the level of brackets. On every [ it is incremented by 1, and on every ] it is decremented by one. This is done because gsub(/\[/,"",$t) returns the number of replaced characters. When having a token like [[][ the count is increased by (3-1=) 2. When a token has brackets AND a semicolon my code will fail, because the token will match, if it ends with a :, before the count of the brackets.
I have text that looks like this:
Name (OneData) [113C188D-5F70-44FE-A709-A07A5289B75D] (MoreData)
I want to use grep or some other way to get the ID inside [].
How to do it?
You can do something like this via bash (GNU grep required):
t="Name (OneData) [113C188D-5F70-44FE-A709-A07A5289B75D] (MoreData)"
echo "$t" | grep -Po "(?<=\[).*(?=\])"
The pattern will give you everything between the brackets, and uses a zero-width look-behind assertion (?<= ...) to eliminate the opening bracket and uses a zero-width look-ahead assertion (?= ...) to eliminate the closing bracket.
The -P flag activates perl-style regexes which can be useful not having too much to escape, then. The -o flag will give you only the wanted result (not the "non-capturing groups").
If you don't have GNU grep available, you can solve the problem in two steps (there are probably also other solutions):
Get the ID with the brackets (\[.*\])
Remove the brackets (] and [, here via sed, for example)
echo "$t" | grep -o "\[.*\]" | sed 's/[][]//g'
As Cyrus commented, you can also use the pattern grep -oE '[0-9A-F-]{36}' if you can ensure not having strings of length 36 or larger containing only the characters 0-9, A-F and - and if all the IDs have the length of 36 characters, of course. Then you can simply ignore the brackets.
I have two lists, one of which contains wildcards (in this case represented by *). I would like to compare the two lists and create an output of those that match, with each wildcard * representing a single character.
For example:
File 1
123456|Jane|Johnson|Pharmacist|janejohnson#gmail.com
09876579|Frank|Roberts|Butcher|frankie1#hotmail.com
092362936|Joe|Jordan|Joiner|joe#joesjoinery.com
928|Bob|Horton|Farmer|bhorton#farmernews.co.uk
File 2
1***6|Jane|Johnson|Pharmacist|janejohnson#gmail.com
09876579|Frank|Roberts|Butcher|f**1#hotmail.com
092362936|Joe|Jordan|J*****|joe#joesjoinery.com
928|Bob|Horton|Farmer|b*****n#f*********.co.uk
Output
092362936|Joe|Jordan|Joiner|joe#joesjoinery.com
928|Bob|Horton|Farmer|bhorton#farmernews.co.uk
Explanation
The first two lines are not considered matches because the number of *s is not equal to the number of characters shown in the first file. The latter two are, so they are added to output.
I have tried to reason out ways to do this in AWK and using Join, but I don't know any way to even start trying to achieve this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
$ cat tst.awk
NR==FNR {
file1[$0]
next
}
{
# Make every non-* char literal (see https://stackoverflow.com/a/29613573/1745001):
gsub(/[^^*]/,"[&]") # Convert every char X to [X] except ^ and *
gsub(/\^/,"\\^") # Convert every ^ to \^
# Convert every * to .:
gsub(/\*/,".")
# Add line start/end anchors
$0 = "^" $0 "$"
# See if the current file2 line matches any line from file1
# and if so print that line from file1:
for ( line in file1 ) {
if ( line ~ $0 ) {
print line
}
}
}
$ awk -f tst.awk file1 file2
092362936|Joe|Jordan|Joiner|joe#joesjoinery.com
928|Bob|Horton|Farmer|bhorton#farmernews.co.uk
sed 's/\./\\./g; s/\*/./g' file2 | xargs -I{} grep {} file1
Explanation:
I'd take advantage of regular expression matching. To do that, we need to turn every asterisk * into a dot ., which represents any character in regular expressions. As a side effect of enabling regular expressions, we need to escape all special characters, particularly the ., in order for them to be taken literally. In a regular expression, we need to use \. to represent a dot (as opposed to any character).
The first step is perform these substitutions with sed, the second is passing every resulting line as a search pattern to grep, and search file1 for that pattern. The glue that allows to do this is xargs, where a {} is a placeholder representing a single line from the results of the sed command.
Note:
This is not a general, safe solution you can simply copy and paste: you should watch out for any characters, in your file containing the asterisks, that are considered special in grep regular expressions.
Update:
jhnc extends the escaping to any of the following characters: .\^$[], thus accounting for almost all sorts of email addresses. He/she then avoids the use of xargs by employing -f - to pass the results of sed as search expressions to grep:
sed 's/[.\\^$[]/\\&/g; s/[*]/./g' file2 | grep -f - file1
This solution is both more general and more efficient, see comment below.
I'm trying to do a grep command that finds all lines in a file whos first word begins "as" and whos first word also ends with "ng"
How would I go about doing this using grep?
This should just about do it:
$ grep '^as\w*ng\b' file
Regexplanation:
^ # Matches start of the line
as # Matches literal string as
\w # Matches characters in word class
* # Quantifies \w to match either zero or more
ng # Matches literal string ng
\b # Matches word boundary
May have missed the odd corner case.
If you only want to print the words that match and not the whole lines then use the -o option:
$ grep -o '^as\w*ng\b' file
Read man grep for all information on the available options.
I am pretty sure this should work:
grep "^as[a-zA-Z]*ng\b" <filename>
hard to say without seeing samples from the actual input file.
sudo has already covered it well, but I wanted to throw out one more simple one:
grep -i '^as[^ ]*ng\b' <file>
-i to make grep case-insensitive
[^ ]* matches zero or more of any character, except a space
^ finds the 'first character in a line', so you can search for that with:
grep '^as' [file]
\w matches a word character, so \w* would match any number of word characters:
grep '^as\w*' [file]
\b means 'a boundary between a word and whitespace' which you can use to ensure that you're matching the 'ng' letters at the end of the word, instead of just somewhere in the middle:
grep '^as\w*ng\b' [file]
If you choose to omit the [file], simply pipe your files into it:
cat [file] | grep '^as\w*ng\b'
or
echo [some text here] | grep '^as\w*ng\b'
Is that what you're looking for?
how to use grep to find occurrences of words from a dictionary file which have a given set of letters with the restriction that each letter occurs once and only once.
EG if the letters are abc then the expected output is:
cab
EDIT:
Given a dictionary file (that is a file containing one word per line such as /usr/share/dict/words on mac os x operating system) and a set of (unique) characters, I want to print out all of the dictionary file's words that contain each character of the input set once and only once. For example if the set of characters is {a,b,c} then print out all (3-letter) words that contain each character of the set.
I am looking, preferably, for a solution that uses just grep expressions.
Given a series of letters, for example abc, you can convert each one to a lookahead, like this:
^(?=[^a]*a[^a]*)(?=[^b]*b[^b]*)(?=[^c]*c[^c]*)$
You may need to use the "extended regex" flag -E to use this regex with grep.
To create this regex from a string, you could use sed (an exercise for the reader)
grep -E ^[abc]{3}.$ <Dictionary file> | grep -v -e a.*a -e b.*b -e c.*c
i.e. Find all three letter strings matching the input and pipe these through inverse grep to remove strings with double letters.
I'm using the '.' after {3} because my dictionary file is windows based so has an extra carriage return or line feed. So, that's probably not necessary.
Below is a Perl solution. Note, you'll need to add more words to the dictionary, and read input in to the $input variable. An array of valid words will end up in #results.
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use Data::Dumper;
my $input = "abc";
my #dictionary = qw(aaa aac aad aal aam aap aar aas aat aaw aba abc abd abf abg
abh abm abn abo abr abs abv abw aca acc ace aci ack acl acp acs act acv ada adb
adc add adf adh adl adn ado adp adq adr ads adt adw aea aeb aec aed aef aes aev
afb afc afe aff afg afi afk afl afn afp aft afu afv agb agc agl agm agn ago agp
...
PUT A REAL DICTIONARY HERE!
...
zie zif zig zii zij zik zil zim zin zio zip zir zis zit ziu ziv zlm zlo zlx zma
zme zmi zmu zna zoa zob zoe zog zoi zol zom zon zoo zor zos zot zou zov zoy zrn
zsr zub zud zug zui zuk zul zum zun zuo zur zus zut zuz zva zwo zye zzz);
# Generate a lookahead expression for each character in the input word
my $regexp = join("", map { "(?=.*$_)" } split(//, $input));
my #results;
foreach my $word (#dictionary) {
# If the size of the input doesn't match the dictionary word, skip to the
# next word.
if (length($input) != length($word)) {
next;
}
if ($word =~ /$regexp/) {
push(#results, $word);
}
}
print Dumper #results;
The solution I found involves using grep first to extract all n-letter words that contain only letters from the input set - although some letters might appear more than once, some may not appear; (again I am assuming that the input letters are unique). Then it does a series of 1-letter greps to make sure each letter occurs at least once. Because the words are of length n this ensures the word contains each letter once and only once. For example, if the input character set is (a,b,c} then the solution would be:
grep -E '^[abc]{3}$' /usr/share/dict/words | grep a | grep b | grep c
a simple bash script can be written which creates this grep string and executes it against the word file, using $1 as the input letter set. It might not be the most efficient method of generating the string, but as I am not familiar with sed or awk it does seem to solve my problem. The script I created is:
#!/bin/sh
slen=${#1}
g2="'^[$1]{$slen}\$'"
g3=""
ix1=0
while [ $ix1 -lt $slen ]
do
g3="$g3 | grep ${1:$ix1:1}"
ix1=$((ix1+1))
done
eval grep -E $g2 /usr/share/dict/words $g3