ACK-GREP ignore whitespaces - regex

I've switched to ACK-GREP recently (bye, bye standard grep) and the only thing I'm missing is the option to ignore whitespaces while searching.
Example:
#param(
'lol', int, "Foo bar",
can=False, hasBurger=True
)
and I want to find it by
ack #param('lol'
What do I have to change/add in .ackrc to force this behawior?

You can't. It is not due to the space but the new line. From the FAQ at the man page:
*Can I do multi-line regexes?*
No, ack does not support regexes that match multiple lines. Doing so would require
reading in the entire file at a time.
However, you can build your own pipe and delete all spaces:
cat YOURFILE | tr -d [:space:] | ack --type=TYPE -o PATTERN
But I guess, this is not exactly what you want.

Related

Highlight all keys that look like '&name=' in a text with grep console [duplicate]

I want to grep the shortest match and the pattern should be something like:
<car ... model=BMW ...>
...
...
...
</car>
... means any character and the input is multiple lines.
You're looking for a non-greedy (or lazy) match. To get a non-greedy match in regular expressions you need to use the modifier ? after the quantifier. For example you can change .* to .*?.
By default grep doesn't support non-greedy modifiers, but you can use grep -P to use the Perl syntax.
Actualy the .*? only works in perl. I am not sure what the equivalent grep extended regexp syntax would be. Fortunately you can use perl syntax with grep so grep -P would work but grep -E which is same as egrep would not work (it would be greedy).
See also: http://blog.vinceliu.com/2008/02/non-greedy-regular-expression-matching.html
grep
For non-greedy match in grep you could use a negated character class. In other words, try to avoid wildcards.
For example, to fetch all links to jpeg files from the page content, you'd use:
grep -o '"[^" ]\+.jpg"'
To deal with multiple line, pipe the input through xargs first. For performance, use ripgrep.
My grep that works after trying out stuff in this thread:
echo "hi how are you " | grep -shoP ".*? "
Just make sure you append a space to each one of your lines
(Mine was a line by line search to spit out words)
Sorry I am 9 years late, but this might work for the viewers in 2020.
So suppose you have a line like "Hello my name is Jello".
Now you want to find the words that start with 'H' and end with 'o', with any number of characters in between. And we don't want lines we just want words. So for that we can use the expression:
grep "H[^ ]*o" file
This will return all the words. The way this works is that: It will allow all the characters instead of space character in between, this way we can avoid multiple words in the same line.
Now you can replace the space character with any other character you want.
Suppose the initial line was "Hello-my-name-is-Jello", then you can get words using the expression:
grep "H[^-]*o" file
The short answer is using the next regular expression:
(?s)<car .*? model=BMW .*?>.*?</car>
(?s) - this makes a match across multiline
.*? - matches any character, a number of times in a lazy way (minimal
match)
A (little) more complicated answer is:
(?s)<([a-z\-_0-9]+?) .*? model=BMW .*?>.*?</\1>
This will makes possible to match car1 and car2 in the following text
<car1 ... model=BMW ...>
...
...
...
</car1>
<car2 ... model=BMW ...>
...
...
...
</car2>
(..) represents a capturing group
\1 in this context matches the sametext as most recently matched by
capturing group number 1
I know that its a bit of a dead post but I just noticed that this works. It removed both clean-up and cleanup from my output.
> grep -v -e 'clean\-\?up'
> grep --version grep (GNU grep) 2.20

sed: replace a match with the same match and add more text

I have a file called config.properties that contains the following text:
cat config.properties
// a lot of data
com.enterprise.project.AERO_CARRIERS = LA|LP|XL|4M|LU|4C
//more data
and my goal is keep the same data but adding more. For this example i want to add to the assignment of this variable |JJ|PZ results in:
cat config.properties
// a lot of data
com.enterprise.project.AERO_CARRIERS = LA|LP|XL|4M|LU|4C|JJ|PZ
//more data
The command that I've been using for this is :
sed 's/\(com\.enterprise\.project\.AERO_CARRIERS\s*\=\s*.+\)/\1\|JJ\|PZ/g' config.properties
But this doesn't works. What am I doing wrong?
\s and + are not POSIX compliant:
you can match spaces and tabs with [[:blank:]] and whitespace characters(including line breaks) with [[:space:]].
.+ can be replaced with .\{1,\} or ..*
And you don't need to use backreference here, use & instead to output lines matching your pattern:
sed 's/^com\.enterprise\.project\.AERO_CARRIERS[[:blank:]]*=[[:blank:]]*.\{1,\}/&|JJ|PZ/'
As an alternative to use stream-editors like sed, just use the native text editor, ed from UNIX-days for in-place search and replacement. The option used (-s) is POSIX compliant, so no issues on portability,
printf '%s\n' ",g/com.enterprise.project.AERO_CARRIERS/ s/$/\|JJ\|PZ/g" w q | ed -s -- inputFile
The part ,g/com.enterprise.project.AERO_CARRIERS/ searches for the line containing the pattern, and the part s/$/\|JJ\|PZ/g appends |JJ|PZ to end of that line and w q writes and saves the file, in-place.
You can match first:
sed '/com\.enterprise\.project\.AERO_CARRIERS\s*\=\s*.\+/ s/$/|JJ|PZ/g' config.properties

sed : match all instances of regex in infile1.txt, and output only these to outfile2.txt

I have a text file infile1 with 1,000's of lines.
I wish to use sed to extract the occuring instances of a regex pattern match to outfile2.
NB
Each instance of the regex pattern match may occur more than once on each line of infile1.
Each instance of the extracted regex pattern should be printed to a new line in outfile2.
Does anyone know the syntax within sed to place the regex into?
ps the regex pattern is
\(Google[ ]{1,3}“[a-zA-Z0-9 ]{1,100}[., ]{0,3}”\)
Thank you :)
I think you want
grep -oE 'Google[ ]{1,3}"[a-zA-Z0-9 ]{1,100}[., ]{0,3}"' filename
-o tells grep to print only the matches, each on a line of its own, and -E instructs it to interpret the regex in extended POSIX syntax, which your regex appears to be.
Note that [ ] could be replaced with just a space, and you might want to use [[:alnum:] ] instead of [a-zA-Z0-9 ] to cover umlauts and suchlike if they exist in the current locale.
Addendum: It is also possible to do this with sed. I don't recommend it, but you could write (using GNU sed):
sed -rn 's/Google[ ]{1,3}"[A-Za-z0-9 ]{1,100}[., ]{0,3}"/\n&\n/g; s/[^\n]*\n([^\n]*\n)/\1/g; s/\n[^\n]*$//p' filename
To make this work with older versions of BSD sed, use -En instead of -rn. -r and -E enable extended regex syntax. -r was historically used by GNU sed, -E by BSD sed; newer versions of them support both for compatibility. -n disables auto-printing.
The code works as follows:
# mark all occurrences of the regex by circumscribing them with newlines
s/Google[ ]{1,3}"[A-Za-z0-9 ]{1,100}[., ]{0,3}"/\n&\n/g
# Isolate every other line from the pattern space (the matches). This will
# leave the part behind the last match...
s/[^\n]*\n([^\n]*\n)/\1/g
# ...so we remove it afterwards and print the result of the transformation if it
# happened (the s///p flag does that). The transformation will not happen if
# there were no matches in the line (because then no newlines will have been
# inserted), so in those cases nothing will be printed.
s/\n[^\n]*$//p
It can be done with sed too, but it isn't pretty:
sed -n ':start /foo/{ h; s/\(foo\).*/\1/; s/.*\(foo\)/\1/; p; g; s/foo\(.*\)/\1/; b start; }' infile1 >outfile2
-- provided that you replace the four occurences of foo above with your pattern Google {1,3}“[a-zA-Z0-9 ]{1,100}[., ]{0,3}”.
Yeah, I told you it isn't pretty. :)

Grep/Sed between two tags with multiline

I have many files from which I need to get information.
Example of my files:
first file content:
"test This info i need grep</singleline>"
and
second file content (with two lines):
"test This info=
i need grep too</singleline>"
in results I need grep this text: from first file - "This info i need grep" and from second file - "This info= i need grep too"
In first file I use:
grep -o 'test .*</singleline>' * | sed -e 's/test \(.*\)<\/singleline>/\1/'
and successfully get "This info i need grep" but I can not get the information from the second file by using the same command.
Please help rewrite the command or write what the other.
Or, if you insist to use grep, you can:
grep -Pzo 'test(\n|.)*(?=</singleline>)' test.txt
To understand the meaning of each flag, use grep --help:
-P, --perl-regexp
PATTERN is a Perl regular expression
-o, --only-matching
show only the part of a line matching PATTERN
-z, --null-data
a data line ends in 0 byte, not newline
I'd use pcregrep, which can match multiline regexes:
pcregrep -Mo 'test \K((?s).)*?(?=</singleline>)' filename
The tricks are:
-M allows pcregrep to match on more than one line,
-o makes it print only the match,
\K throws away the part of the match that comes before it,
(?=</singleline>) is a lookahead term that matches an empty string if (and only if) it is followed by </singleline>, and
((?s).)*? to match any characters non-greedily, which is to say that if you have several occurrences of </singleline> in the file, it will match until the closest rather than the furthest. If this is not desired, remove the ?. (?s) enables the s option locally for the term to make . match newlines in it; it wouldn't do that by default.
Thanks to #CasimiretHippolyte for pointing out the ((?s).) alternative to (.|\n).
It looks like you're parsing quoted-printable encoded text, where a "soft" line break (one that is an artifact from fixed-line-width formatting) is indicated with a line-terminating = (directly before the \n).
Since in a later comment you also expressed the desire to print each match as a single line, I suggest the following 2-pass appraoch:
use awk to remove the soft line breaks
then use grep on the result
awk '/=$/ { printf "%s", substr($0, 1, length($0)-2); next } 1' file |
grep -Po 'test .*?(?=</singleline>)'
Tip of the hat to Wintermute's helpful answer for the non-greedy quantifier, *?, and both Wintermute's and Maroun Maroun's helpful answer for the positive look-ahead assertion, (?=...).
Not that the awk command removes the line-ending = (along with the newline); replace the substr call with just $0 to retain it.
Since strings of interest are first converted back their original single-line representations:
The matches are printed in their original form.
You can use regular (GNU) grep with line-by-line matching; contrast this with
needing to read the entire file at once, as in Maroun Maroun's helpful answer.
Note that, as of this writing, * must be replaced with *? in his answer to work correctly work in files with multiple matches.
needing to install another utility, pcregrep, as in Wintermute's helpful answer.
additionally, the matches would have to be cleaned up to be single-line (something you didn't originally state as a requirement).

How to swap text based on patterns at once with sed?

Suppose I have 'abbc' string and I want to replace:
ab -> bc
bc -> ab
If I try two replaces the result is not what I want:
echo 'abbc' | sed 's/ab/bc/g;s/bc/ab/g'
abab
So what sed command can I use to replace like below?
echo abbc | sed SED_COMMAND
bcab
EDIT:
Actually the text could have more than 2 patterns and I don't know how many replaces I will need. Since there was a answer saying that sed is a stream editor and its replaces are greedily I think that I will need to use some script language for that.
Maybe something like this:
sed 's/ab/~~/g; s/bc/ab/g; s/~~/bc/g'
Replace ~ with a character that you know won't be in the string.
I always use multiple statements with "-e"
$ sed -e 's:AND:\n&:g' -e 's:GROUP BY:\n&:g' -e 's:UNION:\n&:g' -e 's:FROM:\n&:g' file > readable.sql
This will append a '\n' before all AND's, GROUP BY's, UNION's and FROM's, whereas '&' means the matched string and '\n&' means you want to replace the matched string with an '\n' before the 'matched'
sed is a stream editor. It searches and replaces greedily. The only way to do what you asked for is using an intermediate substitution pattern and changing it back in the end.
echo 'abcd' | sed -e 's/ab/xy/;s/cd/ab/;s/xy/cd/'
Here is a variation on ooga's answer that works for multiple search and replace pairs without having to check how values might be reused:
sed -i '
s/\bAB\b/________BC________/g
s/\bBC\b/________CD________/g
s/________//g
' path_to_your_files/*.txt
Here is an example:
before:
some text AB some more text "BC" and more text.
after:
some text BC some more text "CD" and more text.
Note that \b denotes word boundaries, which is what prevents the ________ from interfering with the search (I'm using GNU sed 4.2.2 on Ubuntu). If you are not using a word boundary search, then this technique may not work.
Also note that this gives the same results as removing the s/________//g and appending && sed -i 's/________//g' path_to_your_files/*.txt to the end of the command, but doesn't require specifying the path twice.
A general variation on this would be to use \x0 or _\x0_ in place of ________ if you know that no nulls appear in your files, as jthill suggested.
Here is an excerpt from the SED manual:
-e script
--expression=script
Add the commands in script to the set of commands to be run while processing the input.
Prepend each substitution with -e option and collect them together. The example that works for me follows:
sed < ../.env-turret.dist \
-e "s/{{ name }}/turret$TURRETS_COUNT_INIT/g" \
-e "s/{{ account }}/$CFW_ACCOUNT_ID/g" > ./.env.dist
This example also shows how to use environment variables in your substitutions.
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed -r '1{x;s/^/:abbc:bcab/;x};G;s/^/\n/;:a;/\n\n/{P;d};s/\n(ab|bc)(.*\n.*:(\1)([^:]*))/\4\n\2/;ta;s/\n(.)/\1\n/;ta' file
This uses a lookup table which is prepared and held in the hold space (HS) and then appended to each line. An unique marker (in this case \n) is prepended to the start of the line and used as a method to bump-along the search throughout the length of the line. Once the marker reaches the end of the line the process is finished and is printed out the lookup table and markers being discarded.
N.B. The lookup table is prepped at the very start and a second unique marker (in this case :) chosen so as not to clash with the substitution strings.
With some comments:
sed -r '
# initialize hold with :abbc:bcab
1 {
x
s/^/:abbc:bcab/
x
}
G # append hold to patt (after a \n)
s/^/\n/ # prepend a \n
:a
/\n\n/ {
P # print patt up to first \n
d # delete patt & start next cycle
}
s/\n(ab|bc)(.*\n.*:(\1)([^:]*))/\4\n\2/
ta # goto a if sub occurred
s/\n(.)/\1\n/ # move one char past the first \n
ta # goto a if sub occurred
'
The table works like this:
** ** replacement
:abbc:bcab
** ** pattern
Tcl has a builtin for this
$ tclsh
% string map {ab bc bc ab} abbc
bcab
This works by walking the string a character at a time doing string comparisons starting at the current position.
In perl:
perl -E '
sub string_map {
my ($str, %map) = #_;
my $i = 0;
while ($i < length $str) {
KEYS:
for my $key (keys %map) {
if (substr($str, $i, length $key) eq $key) {
substr($str, $i, length $key) = $map{$key};
$i += length($map{$key}) - 1;
last KEYS;
}
}
$i++;
}
return $str;
}
say string_map("abbc", "ab"=>"bc", "bc"=>"ab");
'
bcab
May be a simpler approach for single pattern occurrence you can try as below:
echo 'abbc' | sed 's/ab/bc/;s/bc/ab/2'
My output:
~# echo 'abbc' | sed 's/ab/bc/;s/bc/ab/2'
bcab
For multiple occurrences of pattern:
sed 's/\(ab\)\(bc\)/\2\1/g'
Example
~# cat try.txt
abbc abbc abbc
bcab abbc bcab
abbc abbc bcab
~# sed 's/\(ab\)\(bc\)/\2\1/g' try.txt
bcab bcab bcab
bcab bcab bcab
bcab bcab bcab
Hope this helps !!
echo "C:\Users\San.Tan\My Folder\project1" | sed -e 's/C:\\/mnt\/c\//;s/\\/\//g'
replaces
C:\Users\San.Tan\My Folder\project1
to
mnt/c/Users/San.Tan/My Folder/project1
in case someone needs to replace windows paths to Windows Subsystem for Linux(WSL) paths
If replacing the string by Variable, the solution doesn't work.
The sed command need to be in double quotes instead on single quote.
#sed -e "s/#replacevarServiceName#/$varServiceName/g" -e "s/#replacevarImageTag#/$varImageTag/g" deployment.yaml
Here is an awk based on oogas sed
echo 'abbc' | awk '{gsub(/ab/,"xy");gsub(/bc/,"ab");gsub(/xy/,"bc")}1'
bcab
I believe this should solve your problem. I may be missing a few edge cases, please comment if you notice one.
You need a way to exclude previous substitutions from future patterns, which really means making outputs distinguishable, as well as excluding these outputs from your searches, and finally making outputs indistinguishable again. This is very similar to the quoting/escaping process, so I'll draw from it.
s/\\/\\\\/g escapes all existing backslashes
s/ab/\\b\\c/g substitutes raw ab for escaped bc
s/bc/\\a\\b/g substitutes raw bc for escaped ab
s/\\\(.\)/\1/g substitutes all escaped X for raw X
I have not accounted for backslashes in ab or bc, but intuitively, I would escape the search and replace terms the same way - \ now matches \\, and substituted \\ will appear as \.
Until now I have been using backslashes as the escape character, but it's not necessarily the best choice. Almost any character should work, but be careful with the characters that need escaping in your environment, sed, etc. depending on how you intend to use the results.
Every answer posted thus far seems to agree with the statement by kuriouscoder made in his above post:
The only way to do what you asked for is using an intermediate
substitution pattern and changing it back in the end
If you are going to do this, however, and your usage might involve more than some trivial string (maybe you are filtering data, etc.), the best character to use with sed is a newline. This is because since sed is 100% line-based, a newline is the one-and-only character you are guaranteed to never receive when a new line is fetched (forget about GNU multi-line extensions for this discussion).
To start with, here is a very simple approach to solving your problem using newlines as an intermediate delimiter:
echo "abbc" | sed -E $'s/ab|bc/\\\n&/g; s/\\nab/bc/g; s/\\nbc/ab/g'
With simplicity comes some trade-offs... if you had more than a couple variables, like in your original post, you have to type them all twice. Performance might be able to be improved a little bit, too.
It gets pretty nasty to do much beyond this using sed. Even with some of the more advanced features like branching control and the hold buffer (which is really weak IMO), your options are pretty limited.
Just for fun, I came up with this one alternative, but I don't think I would have any particular reason to recommend it over the one from earlier in this post... You have to essentially make your own "convention" for delimiters if you really want to do anything fancy in sed. This is way-overkill for your original post, but it might spark some ideas for people who come across this post and have more complicated situations.
My convention below was: use multiple newlines to "protect" or "unprotect" the part of the line you're working on. One newline denotes a word boundary. Two newlines denote alternatives for a candidate replacement. I don't replace right away, but rather list the candidate replacement on the next line. Three newlines means that a value is "locked-in", like your original post way trying to do with ab and bc. After that point, further replacements will be undone, because they are protected by the newlines. A little complicated if I don't say so myself... ! sed isn't really meant for much more than the basics.
# Newlines
NL=$'\\\n'
NOT_NL=$'[\x01-\x09\x0B-\x7F]'
# Delimiters
PRE="${NL}${NL}&${NL}"
POST="${NL}${NL}"
# Un-doer (if a request was made to modify a locked-in value)
tidy="s/(\\n\\n\\n${NOT_NL}*)\\n\\n(${NOT_NL}*)\\n(${NOT_NL}*)\\n\\n/\\1\\2/g; "
# Locker-inner (three newlines means "do not touch")
tidy+="s/(\\n\\n)${NOT_NL}*\\n(${NOT_NL}*\\n\\n)/\\1${NL}\\2/g;"
# Finalizer (remove newlines)
final="s/\\n//g"
# Input/Commands
input="abbc"
cmd1="s/(ab)/${PRE}bc${POST}/g"
cmd2="s/(bc)/${PRE}ab${POST}/g"
# Execute
echo ${input} | sed -E "${cmd1}; ${tidy}; ${cmd2}; ${tidy}; ${final}"