preg_match_all equivalent for BASH? - regex

Question

I have a string like this
foo:collection:indexation [options] [--] <text> <text_1> <text_2> <text_3> <text_4>
And i want to use bash regex to get an array or string that I can split to get this in order to check if the syntax is correct
["text", "text_1", "text_2", "text_3", "text_4"]
I have tried to do this :
COMMAND_OUTPUT=$($COMMAND_HELP)
# get the output of the help
# regex
ARGUMENT_REGEX="<([^>]+)>"
GOOD_REGEX="[a-z-]"
# get all the arguments
while [[ $COMMAND_OUTPUT =~ $ARGUMENT_REGEX ]]; do
ARGUMENT="${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
# bad syntax
if [[ ! $ARGUMENT =~ $GOOD_REGEX ]]; then
echo "Invalid argument '$ARGUMENT' for the command $FILE"
echo "Must only use characters [a-z:-]"
exit 5
fi
done
But the while does not seem to be appropriate since I always get the first match.
How can I get all the matches for this regex ?
Thanks !

Answer 1

The loop doesn't work because every time you're just testing the same input string against the regexp. It doesn't know that it should start scanning after the match from the previous iteration. You'd need to remove the part of the string up to and including the previous match before doing the next test.
A simpler way is to use grep -o to get all the matches.
$COMMAND_HELP | grep -o "$ARGUMENT_REGEX" | while read ARGUMENT; do
if [[ ! $ARGUMENT =~ $GOOD_REGEX ]]; then
echo "Invalid argument '$ARGUMENT' for the command $FILE"
echo "Must only use characters [a-z:-]"
exit 5
fi
done

Answer 2

Bash doesn't have this directly, but you can achieve a similar effect with a slight modification.
string='foo...'
re='<([^>]+)>'
while [[ $string =~ $re(.*) ]]; do
string=${BASH_REMATCH[2]}
# process as before
done
This matches the regex we want and also everything in the string after the regex. We keep shortening $string by assigning only the after-our-regex portion to it on every iteration. On the last iteration, ${BASH_REMATCH[2]} will be empty so the loop will terminate.