I am trying to do compare a string in bash to a regex pattern and have found something odd. For starters I am using GNU bash, version 5.0.17(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu). This is within WSL.
For example here is sample program demonstrating the problem:
#!/bin/env bash
name="John"
if [[ "${name}" =~ "John"* ]]; then
echo "found"
else
echo "not found"
fi
exit
As expected this will echo found since the name "John" matches the regex pattern described. Now what I find odd is if I drop the n in John, it still echos found. Imo "Joh" does match the pattern of "John"*.
If you drop the "hn" and just set $name to "Jo" then it echos not found. It seems to only affect the last character in the Regex pattern (aside from the wildcard).
I am converting an old csh script to bash and this behavior is not happening in csh. What is causing bash to do this?
You're mixing up syntax for shell patterns and regular expressions. Your regular expression, after stripping the quoting, is John*: Joh followed by any number of n, including 0. Matches Joh, John, Johnn, Johnnn, ...
It's not anchored, so it also matches any string containing one of the matches above.
Since it's not anchored, depending on what you want, you could do any of these:
Any string containing John should match:
Regex: [[ $name =~ John ]]
Shell pattern: [[ $name == *John* ]]
Any string that begins with John should match:
Regex: [[ $name =~ ^John ]]
Shell pattern: [[ $name == John* ]]
Notice that shell patterns, unlike the regular expressions, must match the entire string.
A note on quoting: within [[ ... ]], the left-hand side doesn't have to be quoted; on the right-hand side, quoted parts are interpreted literally. For regular expressions, it's a good practice to define it in a separate variable:
re='^John'
if [[ $name =~ $re ]]; then
This avoids a few edge cases with special characters in the regex.
The =~ operator compares using regular expression syntax, not glob syntax. The * isn't a shell wildcard, it means, "the previous character, 0 or more times".
The string Joh matches the regular expression John* because it contains Joh followed by zero n characters.
Related
DPHPV = /usr/local/nginx/conf/php81-remi.conf;
I am unable to figure out how to match a string that contains any 2 digits:
if [[ "$DPHPV" =~ *"php[:digit:][:digit:]-remi.conf"* ]]
You are not using the right regex here as * is a quantifier in regex, not a placeholder for any text.
Actually, you do not need a regex, you may use a mere glob pattern like
if [[ "$DPHPV" == *php[[:digit:]][[:digit:]]-remi.conf ]]
Note
== - enables glob matching
*php[[:digit:]][[:digit:]]-remi.conf - matches any text with *, then matches php, then two digits (note that the POSIX character classes must be used inside bracket expressions), and then -rem.conf at the end of string.
See the online demo:
#!/bin/bash
DPHPV='/usr/local/nginx/conf/php81-remi.conf'
if [[ "$DPHPV" == *php[[:digit:]][[:digit:]]-remi.conf ]]; then
echo yes;
else
echo no;
fi
Output: yes.
Inside of my $foo variable I have this data (please pay close attention to the .s and ,s):
,example.com,de.wikipedia.org,reddit,stackoverflow.com.,amazon.,
I am trying to write an if statement in bash that basically works like this:
if [[ "${foo}" =~ *','[a-z0-9]','* || "${foo}" =~ *','[a-z0-9]'.,'* ]]; then
echo "Invalid input detected"
else
echo "OK"
fi
It would echo Invalid input detected since reddit and amazon. are in $foo.
If I change the contents of $foo to be:
,example.com,de.wikipedia.org,www.reddit.com,stackoverflow.com.,amazon.com,
Then it would echo OK.
I am using bash 3.2.57(1)-release on OS X 10.11.6 El Capitan.
Try:
if [[ $foo =~ ,[a-z0-9]*, || $foo =~ ,[a-z0-9]*\., ]]; then
echo "Invalid input detected"
else
echo "OK"
fi
Notes:
=~ is a regular expression operator. The right-hand-side needs to be a regular expression, not a glob.
, is not a shell-active character. Thus, it does not need any special quoting.
[a-z0-9] matches exactly one alphanumeric. Since we want to allow for more any number, use [a-z0-9]*
In regular expressions, ','* matches zero or more commas. This is not what you want. One might write ,.* which, because, . is a wildcard, matches a comma followed by zero or more of anything. Since the regex is not anchored to the end, adding a final .* makes no difference.
Inside of [[...]] there is no word splitting. So shell variables do not the double-quoting that need elsewhere.
Note that, in [a-z0-9], the exact characters that match a-z or 0-9 depend on the collation order in the locale.
Below, I use ALLOWED as container to test a token.
I am using a Bash regex match syntax =~ where the right hand side should be an extended regular expression.
In Bash's Regular Expression Matching. Using the operator =~, the left hand side operand is matched against the extended regular expression (ERE) on the right hand side. Check a related question on using date regex.
But I can't see str1 as a regex and I don't know why ALLOWED matches a string which is present inside it. Even as this works in this case, having regex (str1) as the test string leaves it open for tricky bugs in future.
export ALLOWED="str0 str1 strn"
export STR1="str1"
export STR2="str2"
if [[ $ALLOWED =~ ${STR1} ]]; then
echo "how does it this work?"
fi
if [[ $ALLOWED =~ ${STR2} ]]; then
:
else
echo "does not work."
fi
Questions:
Why/ How does this work?
What's a better to do test for an element in a list in bash?
The syntax is content =~ regex, for example think about how this simple phone number validation works
$ phone="555-443-2321"; if [[ $phone =~ [0-9-]+ ]]; then echo PASS; fi
as in your example, the right hand side is the regular expression and left hand side is the content.
Your regex can be a string literal, then the check will be whether content contains that substring
$ phone="555-443-2321"; if [[ $phone =~ "555" ]]; then echo PASS; fi
if it makes it easier for you think that as a regex for .*555.*
If I understand right, the confusion is because $a =~ $b checks whether there's a match for $b in $a, not whether $a as a whole matches. [[ "str0 str1 strn" =~ str1 ]] succeeds because there's a match for the (trivial) regex str1 somewhere in "str0 str1 strn".
If you want to check for a match to the entire string, you need to anchor the regex with a ^ at the beginning, and $ at the end: [[ $ALLOWED =~ ^${STR1}$ ]]
i have some regex that is behaving oddly in my shell script i have variables, and i have tried every what way to get them to behave, and they dont seem to do any regex, and i know my regex quite well thanks to regex101, here is what a sample looks like
fname="direcheck"
FIND="*"
if [[ $fname =~ $FIND ]]; then
echo "no quotes"
fi
if [[ "$fname" =~ "$FIND" ]]; then
echo "with quotes"
fi
right now it will display nothing
if i change find to
FIND="[9]*"
then it prints no quotes
if i say
FIND="[a-z]*"
then it prints no quotes
if i say
FIND="dircheck"
then nothing prints
if i say
FIND="*ck"
then nothing prints
I don't get how this regex is working
how do i use these variables, and what is the proper syntax?
* and *ck are invalid regular expressions. It would work (with no quotes) if you were comparing with ==, not =~. If you want to use the same functionality that you get in == for them, the equivalent regexps are .* and .*ck.
[9]* is any number (including zero) of characters that are 9. There is zero characters 9 in your direcheck, so it matches. (Edited from brainfart, thanks chepner)
dircheck is not found in direcheck, so not printing anything is hardly surprising.
[a-z]* is any number of characters that are between a and z (i.e. any number of lowercase letters). This will match, assuming it's not quoted.
I finally figured it out, and why it was working so oddly
[a-z]* and [9]* and [anythinghere]* they all match because it matches zero or more times. so "direcheck" has [9] zero or more times.
so
if [[ "$fname" =~ $FIND ]]; then
or
if [[ $fname =~ $FIND ]]; then
are both correct, and
if [[ "$fname" =~ "$FIND" ]]; then
matches only when the string matches exactly because $FIND is matched as a literal string not regex
I want to parse strings similar to the following into separate variables using regular expressions from within Bash:
Category: entity;scheme="http://schemas.ogf.org/occi/core#";class="kind";title="Entity";attributes="occi.core.id occi.core.title";
or
Category: resource;scheme="http://schemas.ogf.org/occi/core#";class="kind";title="Resource";rel="http://schemas.ogf.org/occi/core#entity";attributes="occi.core.summary";
The first part before "title" is common to all strings, the parts title and attributes are optional.
I managed to extract the mandatory parameters common to all strings, but I have trouble with optional parameters not necessarily present for all strings. As far as I found out, Bash doesn't support Non-capturing parentheses which I would use for this purpose.
Here is what I achieved thus far:
CATEGORY_REGEX='Category:\s*([^;]*);scheme="([^"]*)";class="([^"]*)";'
category_string='Category: entity;scheme="http://schemas.ogf.org/occi/core#";class="kind";title="Entity";attributes="occi.core.id occi.core.title";'
[[ $category_string =~ $CATEGORY_REGEX ]]
echo ${BASH_REMATCH[0]}
echo ${BASH_REMATCH[1]}
echo ${BASH_REMATCH[2]}
echo ${BASH_REMATCH[3]}
The regular expression I would like to use (and which is working for me in Ruby) would be:
CATEGORY_REGEX='Category:\s*([^;]*);\s*scheme="([^"]*)";\s*class="([^"]*)";\s*(?:title="([^"]*)";)?\s*(?:rel="([^"]*)";)?\s*(?:location="([^"]*)";)?\s*(?:attributes="([^"]*)";)?\s*(?:actions="([^"]*)";)?'
Is there any other solution to parse the string with command line tools without having to fall back on perl, python or ruby?
I don't think non-capturing groups exist in bash regex, so your options are to use a scripting language or to remove the ?: from all of the (?:...) groups and just be careful about which groups you reference, for example:
CATEGORY_REGEX='Category:\s*([^;]*);\s*scheme="([^"]*)";\s*class="([^"]*)";\s*(title="([^"]*)";)?\s*(rel="([^"]*)";)?\s*(location="([^"]*)";)?\s*(attributes="([^"]*)";)?\s*(actions="([^"]*)";)?'
category_string='Category: entity;scheme="http://schemas.ogf.org/occi/core#";class="kind";title="Entity";attributes="occi.core.id occi.core.title";'
[[ $category_string =~ $CATEGORY_REGEX ]]
echo "full: ${BASH_REMATCH[0]}"
echo "category: ${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
echo "scheme: ${BASH_REMATCH[2]}"
echo "class: ${BASH_REMATCH[3]}"
echo "title: ${BASH_REMATCH[5]}"
echo "rel: ${BASH_REMATCH[7]}"
echo "location: ${BASH_REMATCH[9]}"
echo "attributes: ${BASH_REMATCH[11]}"
echo "actions: ${BASH_REMATCH[13]}"
Note that starting with the optional parameters we need to skip a group each time, because the even numbered groups from 4 on contain the parameter name as well as the value (if the parameter is present).
You can emulate non-matching groups in bash using a little bit of regexp magic:
_2__ _4__ _5__
[[ "fu#k" =~ ((.+)#|)((.+)/|)(.+) ]];
echo "${BASH_REMATCH[2]:--} ${BASH_REMATCH[4]:--} ${BASH_REMATCH[5]:--}"
# Output: fu - k
Characters # and / are parts of string we parse.
Regexp pipe | is used for either left or right (empty) part matching.
For curious, ${VAR:-<default value>} is variable expansion with default value in case $VAR is empty.