I have a file, each line of which can be described by this grammar:
<text> <colon> <fullpath> <comma> <"by"> <text> <colon> <text> <colon> <text> <colon> <text>
Eg.,
needs fixing (Sunday): src/foo/io.c, by Smith : in progress : <... random comment ...>
How do I get the <fullpath> portion, which lies between the first <colon> and the first <comma>
(I'm not very inclined to write a program to parse this, though this looks like it could be done easily with javacc. Hoping to use some built-in tools like sed, awk, ...)
Or with a regex substitution
sed -n 's/^[^:]*:\([^:,]*\),.*/\1/p' file
Linux sed dialect; if on a different platform, maybe you need an -E option and/or take out the backslashes before the round parentheses; or just go with Perl instead;
perl -nle 'print $1 if m/:(.*?),/' file
Assuming the input will be similar to what you have above:
awk '{print $4}' | tr -d ,
For the entire file you can just type the file name next to the awk command to the command I have above.
If you're using bash script to parse this stuff, you don't even need tools like awk or sed.
$ text="needs fixing (Sunday): src/foo/io.c, by Smith : in progress : <... comment ...>"
$ text=${text%%,*}
$ text=${text#*: }
$ echo "$text"
src/foo/io.c
Read about this on the bash man page under Parameter Expansion.
with GNU grep:
grep -oP '(?<=: ).*?(?=,)'
This may find more than one substring if there are subsequent commas in the line.
Related
I am trying to use grep with the pwd command.
So, if i enter pwd, it shows me something like:
/home/hrq/my-project/
But, for purposes of a script i am making, i need to use it with grep, so it only prints what is after hrq/, so i need to hide my home folder always (the /home/hrq/) excerpt, and show only what is onwards (like, in this case, only my-project).
Is it possible?
I tried something like
pwd | grep -ov 'home', since i saw that the "-v" flag would be equivalent to the NOT operator, and combine it with the "-o" only matching flag. But it didn't work.
Given:
$ pwd
/home/foo/tmp
$ echo "$PWD"
/home/foo/tmp
Depending on what it is you really want to do, either of these is probably what you really should be using rather than trying to use grep:
$ basename "$PWD"
tmp
$ echo "${PWD#/home/foo/}"
tmp
Use grep -Po 'hrq/\K.*', for example:
grep -Po 'hrq/\K.*' <<< '/home/hrq/my-project/'
my-project/
Here, grep uses the following options:
-P : Use Perl regexes.
-o : Print the matches only (1 match per line), not the entire lines.
\K : Cause the regex engine to "keep" everything it had matched prior to the \K and not include it in the match. Specifically, ignore the preceding part of the regex when printing the match.
SEE ALSO:
grep manual
perlre - Perl regular expressions
I need some help with a grep command (in the Bash).
In my source files, I want to list all unique parameters of a function. Background: I want to search through all files, to see, which permissions ([perm("abc")] are used.
Example.txt:
if (x) perm("this"); else perm("that");
perm("what");
I'd like to have my grep output:
this
that
what
If I do my grep with this search expression
perm\(\"(.*?)\"\)
I'll get perm("this), perm("that"), etc. but I'd like to have just the permissions: this and that and what.
How can I do that?
Use a look-behind:
$ grep -Po '(?<=perm\(")[^"]*' file
this
that
what
This looks for all the text occurring after perm(" and until another " is found.
Note -P is used to allow this behaviour (it is a Perl regex) and -o to just print the matched item, instead of the whole line.
Here is a gnu awk version (due to multiple characters in RS)
awk -v RS='perm\\("' -F\" 'NR>1 {print $1}' file
this
that
what
I need to parse and modify a each field from a CSV header line for a dynamic sqlite create table statement. Below is what works from the command line with the appropriate output:
echo ",header1,header2,header3"| awk 'BEGIN {FS=","}; {for(i=2;i<=NF;i++){printf ",%s text ", $i}; printf "\n"}'
,header1 text ,header2 text ,header3 text
Well, it breaks when it is run from within a bash shell script. I got it to work by writing the output to a file like below:
echo $optionalHeaders | awk 'BEGIN {FS=","}; {for(i=2;i<=NF;i++){printf ",%s text ", $i}; printf "\n"}' > optionalHeaders.txt
This sucks! There are a lot of examples that show how to parse/modify specific Nth fields. This issue requires each field to be modified. Is there a more concise and elegant Awk one liner that can store its contents to a variable rather than writing to a file?
sed is usually the right tool for simple substitutions on a single line. Take your pick:
$ echo ",header1,header2,header3" | sed 's/[^,][^,]*/& text/g'
,header1 text,header2 text,header3 text
$ echo ",header1,header2,header3" | sed -r 's/[^,]+/& text/g'
,header1 text,header2 text,header3 text
The last 1 above requires GNU sed to use EREs instead of BREs. You can do the same in awk using gsub() if you prefer:
$ echo ",header1,header2,header3" | awk '{gsub(/[^,]+/,"& text")}1'
,header1 text,header2 text,header3 text
I found the problem and it was me... I forgot to echo the contents of the variable to the Awk command. Brianadams comment was so simple that forced me to re-look at my code and find the problem! Thanks!
I am ok with resolving this but if anyone wants to propose a more concise and elegant Awk one liner - that would be cool.
You can try the following:
#! /bin/bash
header=",header1,header2,header3"
newhead=$(awk 'BEGIN {FS=OFS=","}; {for(i=2;i<=NF;i++) $i=$i" text"}1' <<<"$header")
echo "$newhead"
with output:
,header1 text,header2 text,header3 text
Instead of modifying fields one by one, another option is with a simple substitution:
echo ",header1,header2,header3" | awk '{gsub(/[^,]+/, "& text", $0); print}'
That is, replace a sequence of non-comma characters with text appended.
Another alternative would be replacing the commas, but due to the irregularities of your header line (first comma must be left alone, no comma at the end), that's a bit less easy:
echo ",header1,header2,header3" | awk '{gsub(/,/, " text,", $0); sub(/^ text,/, "", $0); print $0 " text"}'
Btw, the rough equivalent of the two commands in sed:
echo ",header1,header2,header3" | sed -e 's/[^,]\{1,\}/& text/g'
echo ",header1,header2,header3" | sed -e 's/\(.\),/\1 text,/g' -e 's/$/ text/'
I'm trying to parse the output of a command line tool. It outputs XML directly to STDOU and I want to parse it.
The tool outputs a full XML document like the following:
My goal is to parse that output and only the the string between the <date> tag, but since the document might contain another <date> tags, it must check only the the <date> that follows <key>SULastCheckTime</key>. (And that is a messy situation with new line/spaces there).
Currently I'm solving this situation with the following command:
tool... | grep -A1 '<key>SULastCheckTime</key>' | grep 'string.$' | sed -e 's,.*<date>\([^<]*\)</date>.*,\1,g'
It works fine but it's very messy as you can see and I can't write anything better? Can you help me making it better?
Thank you!
PS: Since I'm doing this in OSX, I don't have the new GNU grepoptions. Btw, by bash version is 3.2.48(1). And... I can't afford to install other tools to parse XML in a better way.
Maybe something like this?
$ cat foo.input
foo
foo
<key>some key</key>
<date>some date</date>
bar
bar
<key>SULastCheckTime</key>
<date>2013-08-10T00:27:40Z</date>
quux
quux
$ awk '/<key>SULastCheckTime<\/key>/ { toggle=1 } toggle && /<date>.*<\/date>/ { gsub(/<[^>]*>/, "", $1); print; exit }' foo.input
2013-08-10T00:27:40Z
Is there a way to make grep output "words" from files that match the search expression?
If I want to find all the instances of, say, "th" in a number of files, I can do:
grep "th" *
but the output will be something like (bold is by me);
some-text-file : the cat sat on the mat
some-other-text-file : the quick brown fox
yet-another-text-file : i hope this explains it thoroughly
What I want it to output, using the same search, is:
the
the
the
this
thoroughly
Is this possible using grep? Or using another combination of tools?
Try grep -o:
grep -oh "\w*th\w*" *
Edit: matching from Phil's comment.
From the docs:
-h, --no-filename
Suppress the prefixing of file names on output. This is the default
when there is only one file (or only standard input) to search.
-o, --only-matching
Print only the matched (non-empty) parts of a matching line,
with each such part on a separate output line.
Cross distribution safe answer (including windows minGW?)
grep -h "[[:alpha:]]*th[[:alpha:]]*" 'filename' | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -h "[[:alpha:]]*th[[:alpha:]]*"
If you're using older versions of grep (like 2.4.2) which do not include the -o option, then use the above. Else use the simpler to maintain version below.
Linux cross distribution safe answer
grep -oh "[[:alpha:]]*th[[:alpha:]]*" 'filename'
To summarize: -oh outputs the regular expression matches to the file content (and not its filename), just like how you would expect a regular expression to work in vim/etc... What word or regular expression you would be searching for then, is up to you! As long as you remain with POSIX and not perl syntax (refer below)
More from the manual for grep
-o Print each match, but only the match, not the entire line.
-h Never print filename headers (i.e. filenames) with output lines.
-w The expression is searched for as a word (as if surrounded by
`[[:<:]]' and `[[:>:]]';
The reason why the original answer does not work for everyone
The usage of \w varies from platform to platform, as it's an extended "perl" syntax. As such, those grep installations that are limited to work with POSIX character classes use [[:alpha:]] and not its perl equivalent of \w. See the Wikipedia page on regular expression for more
Ultimately, the POSIX answer above will be a lot more reliable regardless of platform (being the original) for grep
As for support of grep without -o option, the first grep outputs the relevant lines, the tr splits the spaces to new lines, the final grep filters only for the respective lines.
(PS: I know most platforms by now would have been patched for \w.... but there are always those that lag behind)
Credit for the "-o" workaround from #AdamRosenfield answer
It's more simple than you think. Try this:
egrep -wo 'th.[a-z]*' filename.txt #### (Case Sensitive)
egrep -iwo 'th.[a-z]*' filename.txt ### (Case Insensitive)
Where,
egrep: Grep will work with extended regular expression.
w : Matches only word/words instead of substring.
o : Display only matched pattern instead of whole line.
i : If u want to ignore case sensitivity.
You could translate spaces to newlines and then grep, e.g.:
cat * | tr ' ' '\n' | grep th
Just awk, no need combination of tools.
# awk '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){if($i~/^th/){print $i}}}' file
the
the
the
this
thoroughly
grep command for only matching and perl
grep -o -P 'th.*? ' filename
I was unsatisfied with awk's hard to remember syntax but I liked the idea of using one utility to do this.
It seems like ack (or ack-grep if you use Ubuntu) can do this easily:
# ack-grep -ho "\bth.*?\b" *
the
the
the
this
thoroughly
If you omit the -h flag you get:
# ack-grep -o "\bth.*?\b" *
some-other-text-file
1:the
some-text-file
1:the
the
yet-another-text-file
1:this
thoroughly
As a bonus, you can use the --output flag to do this for more complex searches with just about the easiest syntax I've found:
# echo "bug: 1, id: 5, time: 12/27/2010" > test-file
# ack-grep -ho "bug: (\d*), id: (\d*), time: (.*)" --output '$1, $2, $3' test-file
1, 5, 12/27/2010
cat *-text-file | grep -Eio "th[a-z]+"
You can also try pcregrep. There is also a -w option in grep, but in some cases it doesn't work as expected.
From Wikipedia:
cat fruitlist.txt
apple
apples
pineapple
apple-
apple-fruit
fruit-apple
grep -w apple fruitlist.txt
apple
apple-
apple-fruit
fruit-apple
I had a similar problem, looking for grep/pattern regex and the "matched pattern found" as output.
At the end I used egrep (same regex on grep -e or -G didn't give me the same result of egrep) with the option -o
so, I think that could be something similar to (I'm NOT a regex Master) :
egrep -o "the*|this{1}|thoroughly{1}" filename
To search all the words with start with "icon-" the following command works perfect. I am using Ack here which is similar to grep but with better options and nice formatting.
ack -oh --type=html "\w*icon-\w*" | sort | uniq
You could pipe your grep output into Perl like this:
grep "th" * | perl -n -e'while(/(\w*th\w*)/g) {print "$1\n"}'
grep --color -o -E "Begin.{0,}?End" file.txt
? - Match as few as possible until the End
Tested on macos terminal
$ grep -w
Excerpt from grep man page:
-w: 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.
ripgrep
Here are the example using ripgrep:
rg -o "(\w+)?th(\w+)?"
It'll match all words matching th.