Output alpha/numeric/alphanumeric text with grep - grep

I have a single line of text containing 12k of these blocks separated by a comma:
{"hash":"AbCD1QS","title":"","description":"","width":1920,"height":1080,"size":12345689,"ext":".jpg","animated":false,"prefer_video":false,"looping":false,"datetime":"2009-01-04 02:32:61"}
The "alphanumeric" text next to hash can also be all lowercase, all uppercase, contain no numbers, or contain all numbers.
How do I output just the text next to hash using Grep, and each result to a new line?

grep -Po "(?<=hash\":\")[^\"]*"
-P for using perl regular expressions
(?<=hash\":\") matches string after hash":"
[^\"]* matches any characters til the quote mark

Use a JSON parser for JSON data:
$ json='{"hash":"AbCD1QS","title":"","description":"","width":1920,"height":1080,"size":12345689,"ext":".jpg","animated":false,"prefer_video":false,"looping":false,"datetime":"2009-01-04 02:32:61"}'
$ echo "$json" | jq -r '.["hash"]'
AbCD1QS

Related

select only a word that is part of colon

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.

Find all accented words (diacriticals) using grep?

I have a large list of words in a text file (one word per line) Some words have accented characters (diacriticals). How can I use grep to display only the lines that contain accented characters?
The best solution I have found, for a larger class of characters ("What words are not pure ASCII?") is using PCRE with -P option:
grep -P "[\x7f-\xff]" filename
This will find UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1(5) (Latin1, win1252, cp850) accented characters alike.
I have a solution. First strip the accents using "iconv" then do a "diff" for lines in the original file:
cat text-file | iconv -f utf8 -t ascii//TRANSLIT > noaccents-file
diff text-file noaccents-file | grep '<'

Getting only grep exact matches

I am trying to grep a file for the exact occurrence of a match, but I get also longer spurious matches:
grep CAT1717O99 myfile.txt -F -w
Output:
CAT1717O99
CAT1717O99.5
I would like to output only the first exactly matching line. Is there any way to get rid of the second line?
Thanks in advance.
Arturo
This is the file 'myfile.txt':
CAT1717O99
CAT1717O99.5
This will do the work for you.
grep -Fx "CAT1717O99" textfile
-F means Fixed
-x mean exact
Use the power of Perl-compatible regular expression (PCRE) and search the matches to the given pattern:
grep -Po "\bCAT1717O99(\s|$)" myfile.txt
(\s|$) - alternative group, ensures matching substring CAT1717O99 if it's followed by whitespace or placed at the end of the line
-P option, allows regular expressions
-o option, prints only matched parts of matching lines
You'll need explicitly request spaces in order to ignore special chars.
grep -E '(^| )CAT1717O99( |$)' myFile.txt
from grep manual :
-w, --word-regexp
Select only those lines containing matches that form whole words. The test is that the matching substring must either be at the beginning of the line, or preceded by a non-word constituent character. Similarly, it must be either at the end of the line or followed by a non-word constituent character. Word-constituent characters are letters, digits, and the underscore.

Grep: First word in line that begins with ? and ends with?

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 do I use grep to extract a specific field value from lines

I have lines in a file which look like the following
....... DisplayName="john" ..........
where .... represents variable number of other fields.
Using the following grep command, I am able to extract all the lines which have a valid 'DisplayName' field:
grep DisplayName="[0-9A-Za-z[:space:]]*" e:\test
However, I wish to extract just the name (ie "john") from each line instead of the whole line returned by grep. I tried piping the output into the cut command but it does not accept string delimiters.
This works for me:
awk -F "=" '/DisplayName/ {print $2}'
which returns "john". To remove the quotes for john use:
awk -F "=" '/DisplayName/ {gsub("\"","");print $2}'
Specifically:
sed 's/.*DisplayName="\(.*\)".*/\1/'
Should do, sed semantics is s/subsitutethis/forthis/ where "/" is delimiter. The escaped parentheses in combination with escaped 1 are used to keep the part of the pattern designated by parentheses. This expression keeps everything inside the parentheses after displayname and throws away the rest.
This can also work without first using grep, if you use:
sed -n 's/.*DisplayName="\(.*\)".*/\1/p'
The -n option and p flag tells sed to print just the changed lines.
More in: http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html

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