I'm trying to do some regex matching in bash.
I'd like to match multiple block of indented (space or tab) content, with the block itself starting with a keyword.
Some other content could be present in the file.
Using this sample content :
keyword aaa match1
Some other content
keyword ccc match2
indentend content
matching
Some other content
with indendation
keyword ddd match2
indented content still matching
I managed to use this : (^keyword.*(?:\n^\h+.*)*), which seems to be sort of okay, everything is matching as expected. :
https://regex101.com/r/kvMlKK/1
Expected output would be to print every matches :
keyword aaa match1
keyword ccc match2
indentend content
matching
keyword ddd match2
indented content still matching
Unfortunatly I did not find a way to print all matches in bash. I can use grep/sed/awk/perl without any problem (edit: i meant I have access to all these command in the environnement i am working with).
Edit:
grep -E --include \*.md '(^keyword.*(?:\n^\h+.*)*)' $(dirname "$0")/../_inbox/draft.md
Using grep it does not return the full match, only first line because of the lack of multi-line matching support I guess.
I am not familiar with awk/sed, I did not get any meaningful results (even if it seems to be better to use them for multi-line matching).
Edit: if that could work on multiple files that would be awesome
Thanks for your help!
You can do it in pure bash, by looping... Because bash regex doesn't support multi-line matching.
#!/bin/bash
# Flag to track whether inside indented block
indented=0
# Read input line by line
while IFS= read -r line; do
# Check if line starts with keyword
reg="^[ \t]*keyword"
if [[ $line =~ $reg ]]; then
# Print line
printf "%s\n" "$line"
# Set flag to indicate inside indented block
indented=1
else
# Check if line starts with whitespace and inside indented block
reg="^[ \t]+.*"
if [[ $line =~ $reg && $indented -eq 1 ]]; then
# Print line
printf "%s\n" "$line"
else
# Reset flag to indicate outside indented block
indented=0
fi
fi
done < "input"
You can do it in awk too:
awk '/^[ \t]*keyword/{print;while(getline line) if(line~/^[ \t]+.*/) print line;else break}' input
Or use sed
sed -n '/^[ \t]*keyword/{:start;p;n;/^[ \t]/{p;n;b start;}}' input
Using awk:
$ awk '!/^[\t ]/{p=0} /^keyword/{p=1} p' file
keyword aaa match1
keyword ccc match2
indentend content
matching
keyword ddd match2
indented content still matching
$
I'm a beginner in bash and here is my problem. I have a file just like this one:
Azzzezzzezzzezzz...
Bzzzezzzezzzezzz...
Czzzezzzezzzezzz...
I try in a script to edit this file.ABC letters are unique in all this file and there is only one per line.
I want to replace the first e of each line by a number who can be :
1 in line beginning with an A,
2 in line beginning with a B,
3 in line beginning with a C,
and I'd like to loop this in order to have this type of result
Azzz1zzz5zzz1zzz...
Bzzz2zzz4zzz5zzz...
Czzz3zzz6zzz3zzz...
All the numbers here are random int variables between 0 and 9. I really need to start by replacing 1,2,3 in first exec of my loop, then 5,4,6 then 1,5,3 and so on.
I tried this
sed "0,/e/s/e/$1/;0,/e/s/e/$2/;0,/e/s/e/$3/" /tmp/myfile
But the result was this (because I didn't specify the line)
Azzz1zzz2zzz3zzz...
Bzzzezzzezzzezzz...
Czzzezzzezzzezzz...
I noticed that doing sed -i "/A/ s/$/ezzz/" /tmp/myfile will add ezzz at the end of A line so I tried this
sed -i "/A/ 0,/e/s/e/$1/;/B/ 0,/e/s/e/$2/;/C/ 0,/e/s/e/$3/" /tmp/myfile
but it failed
sed: -e expression #1, char 5: unknown command: `0'
Here I'm lost.
I have in a variable (let's call it number_of_e_per_line) the number of e in either A, B or C line.
Thank you for the time you take for me.
Just apply s command on the line that matches A.
sed '
/^A/{ s/e/$1/; }
/^B/{ s/e/$2/; }
# or shorter
/^C/s/e/$3/
'
s command by default replaces the first occurrence. You can do for example s/s/$1/2 to replace the second occurrence, s/e/$1/g (like "Global") replaces all occurrences.
0,/e/ specifies a range of lines - it filters lines from the first up until a line that matches /e/.
sed is not part of Bash. It is a separate (crude) programming language and is a very standard command. See https://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html .
Continuing from the comment. sed is a poor choice here unless all your files can only have 3 lines. The reason is sed processes each line and has no way to keep a separate count for the occurrences of 'e'.
Instead, wrapping sed in a script and keeping track of the replacements allows you to handle any file no matter the number of lines. You just loop and handle the lines one at a time, e.g.
#!/bin/bash
[ -z "$1" ] && { ## valiate one argument for filename provided
printf "error: filename argument required.\nusage: %s filename\n" "./$1" >&2
exit 1
}
[ -s "$1" ] || { ## validate file exists and non-empty
printf "error: file not found or empty '%s'.\n" "$1"
exit 1
}
declare -i n=1 ## occurrence counter initialized 1
## loop reading each line
while read -r line || [ -n "$line" ]; do
[[ $line =~ ^.*e.*$ ]] || continue ## line has 'e' or get next
sed "s/e/1/$n" <<< "$line" ## substitute the 'n' occurence of 'e'
((n++)) ## increment counter
done < "$1"
Your data file having "..." at the end of each line suggests your files is larger than the snippet posted. If you have lines beginning 'A' - 'Z', you don't want to have to write 26 separate /match/s/find/replace/ substitutions. And if you have somewhere between 3 and 26 (or more), you don't want to have to rewrite a different sed expression for every new file you are faced with.
That's why I say sed is a poor choice. You really have no way to make the task a generic task with sed. The downside to using a script is it will become a poor choice as the number of records you need to process increase (over 100000 or so just due to efficiency)
Example Use/Output
With the script in replace-e-incremental.sh and your data in file, you would do:
$ bash replace-e-incremental.sh file
Azzz1zzzezzzezzz...
Bzzzezzz1zzzezzz...
Czzzezzzezzz1zzz...
To Modify file In-Place
Since you make multiple calls to sed here, you need to redirect the output of the file to a temporary file and then replace the original by overwriting it with the temp file, e.g.
$ bash replace-e-incremental.sh file > mytempfile && mv -f mytempfile file
$ cat file
Azzz1zzzezzzezzz...
Bzzzezzz1zzzezzz...
Czzzezzzezzz1zzz...
I have a .csv file that contains double quoted multi-line fields. I need to convert the multi-line cell to a single line. It doesn't show in the sample data but I do not know which fields might be multi-line so any solution will need to check every field. I do know how many columns I'll have. The first line will also need to be skipped. I don't how much data so performance isn't a consideration.
I need something that I can run from a bash script on Linux. Preferably using tools such as awk or sed and not actual programming languages.
The data will be processed further with Logstash but it doesn't handle double quoted multi-line fields hence the need to do some pre-processing.
I tried something like this and it kind of works on one row but fails on multiple rows.
sed -e :0 -e '/,.*,.*,.*,.*,/b' -e N -e '1n;N;N;N;s/\n/ /g' -e b0 file.csv
CSV example
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,"Country
City
Street",12345
The output I want is
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,Country City Street,12345
Jane,Doe,Country City Street,67890
etc.
etc.
First my apologies for getting here 7 months late...
I came across a problem similar to yours today, with multiple fields with multi-line types. I was glad to find your question but at least for my case I have the complexity that, as more than one field is conflicting, quotes might open, close and open again on the same line... anyway, reading a lot and combining answers from different posts I came up with something like this:
First I count the quotes in a line, to do that, I take out everything but quotes and then use wc:
quotes=`echo $line | tr -cd '"' | wc -c` # Counts the quotes
If you think of a single multi-line field, knowing if the quotes are 1 or 2 is enough. In a more generic scenario like mine I have to know if the number of quotes is odd or even to know if the line completes the record or expects more information.
To check for even or odd you can use the mod operand (%), in general:
even % 2 = 0
odd % 2 = 1
For the first line:
Odd means that the line expects more information on the next line.
Even means the line is complete.
For the subsequent lines, I have to know the status of the previous one. for instance in your sample text:
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,"Country
City
Street",12345
You can say line 1 (John,Doe,"Country) has 1 quote (odd) what means the status of the record is incomplete or open.
When you go to line 2, there is no quote (even). Nevertheless this does not mean the record is complete, you have to consider the previous status... so for the lines following the first one it will be:
Odd means that record status toggles (incomplete to complete).
Even means that record status remains as the previous line.
What I did was looping line by line while carrying the status of the last line to the next one:
incomplete=0
cat file.csv | while read line; do
quotes=`echo $line | tr -cd '"' | wc -c` # Counts the quotes
incomplete=$((($quotes+$incomplete)%2)) # Check if Odd or Even to decide status
if [ $incomplete -eq 1 ]; then
echo -n "$line " >> new.csv # If line is incomplete join with next
else
echo "$line" >> new.csv # If line completes the record finish
fi
done
Once this was executed, a file in your format generates a new.csv like this:
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,"Country City Street",12345
I like one-liners as much as everyone, I wrote that script just for the sake of clarity, you can - arguably - write it in one line like:
i=0;cat file.csv|while read l;do i=$((($(echo $l|tr -cd '"'|wc -c)+$i)%2));[[ $i = 1 ]] && echo -n "$l " || echo "$l";done >new.csv
I would appreciate it if you could go back to your example and see if this works for your case (which you most likely already solved). Hopefully this can still help someone else down the road...
Recovering the multi-line fields
Every need is different, in my case I wanted the records in one line to further process the csv to add some bash-extracted data, but I would like to keep the csv as it was. To accomplish that, instead of joining the lines with a space I used a code - likely unique - that I could then search and replace:
i=0;cat file.csv|while read l;do i=$((($(echo $l|tr -cd '"'|wc -c)+$i)%2));[[ $i = 1 ]] && echo -n "$l ~newline~ " || echo "$l";done >new.csv
the code is ~newline~, this is totally arbitrary of course.
Then, after doing my processing, I took the csv text file and replaced the coded newlines with real newlines:
sed -i 's/ ~newline~ /\n/g' new.csv
References:
Ternary operator: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3953666/6316852
Count char occurrences: https://stackoverflow.com/a/41119233/6316852
Other peculiar cases: https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/programming-9/complex-bash-string-substitution-of-csv-file-with-multiline-data-937179/
TL;DR
Run this:
i=0;cat file.csv|while read l;do i=$((($(echo $l|tr -cd '"'|wc -c)+$i)%2));[[ $i = 1 ]] && echo -n "$l " || echo "$l";done >new.csv
... and collect results in new.csv
I hope it helps!
If Perl is your option, please try the following:
perl -e '
while (<>) {
$str .= $_;
}
while ($str =~ /("(("")|[^"])*")|((^|(?<=,))[^,]*((?=,)|$))/g) {
if (($el = $&) =~ /^".*"$/s) {
$el =~ s/^"//s; $el =~ s/"$//s;
$el =~ s/""/"/g;
$el =~ s/\s+(?!$)/ /g;
}
push(#ary, $el);
}
foreach (#ary) {
print /\n$/ ? "$_" : "$_,";
}' sample.csv
sample.csv:
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,"Country
City
Street",12345
John,Doe,"Country
City
Street",67890
Result:
First name,Last name,Address,ZIP
John,Doe,Country City Street,12345
John,Doe,Country City Street,67890
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed ':a;s/[^,]\+/&/4;tb;N;ba;:b;s/\n\+/ /g;s/"//g' file
Test each line to see that it contains the correct number of fields (in the example that was 4). If there are not enough fields, append the next line and repeat the test. Otherwise, replace the newline(s) by spaces and finally remove the "'s.
N.B. This may be fraught with problems such as ,'s between "'s and quoted "'s.
Try cat -v file.csv. When the file was made with Excel, you might have some luck: When the newlines in a field are a simple \n and the newline at the end is a \r\n (which will look like ^M), parsing is simple.
# delete all newlines and replace the ^M with a new newline.
tr -d "\n" < file.csv| tr "\r" "\n"
# Above two steps with one command
tr "\n\r" " \n" < file.csv
When you want a space between the joined line, you need an additional step.
tr "\n\r" " \n" < file.csv | sed '2,$ s/^ //'
EDIT: #sjaak commented this didn't work is his case.
When your broken lines also have ^M you still can be a lucky (wo-)man.
When your broken field is always the first field in double quotes and you have GNU sed 4.2.2, you can join 2 lines when the first line has exactly one double quote.
sed -rz ':a;s/(\n|^)([^"]*)"([^"]*)\n/\1\2"\3 /;ta' file.csv
Explanation:
-z don't use \n as line endings
:a label for repeating the step after successful replacement
(\n|^) Search after a newline or the very first line
([^"]*) Substring without a "
ta Go back to label a and repeat
awk pattern matching is working.
answer in one line :
awk '/,"/{ORS=" "};/",/{ORS="\n"}{print $0}' YourFile
if you'd like to drop quotes, you could use:
awk '/,"/{ORS=" "};/",/{ORS="\n"}{print $0}' YourFile | sed 's/"//gw NewFile'
but I prefer to keep it.
to explain the code:
/Pattern/ : find pattern in current line.
ORS : indicates the output line record.
$0 : indicates the whole of the current line.
's/OldPattern/NewPattern/': substitude first OldPattern with NewPattern
/g : does the previous action for all OldPattern
/w : write the result to Newfile
I'm working on a program that searches a medication list and returns a report as requested by the user. So i am trying to search this list for a code that the user inputs and then return the relevant information.
EX. (medcode) (doseage)
commA6314 ifosfamide 30
home5341209 urokinase 6314
When i search the file i only want it to return the line if it finds a match in columns 6-12 (6314 for the first line) but at the moment it will return both lines since the second line also contains 6314. All of the answers i saw used text processing utilities like awk, sed or perl and one of the conditions of the program is not to use any of these utilities.
The programs expected output:
Enter medication code?
6314
See Generic name g/G or Dose d/D?
g
ifosfamide
What i am getting currently:
Enter medication code?
6314
See Generic name g/G or Dose d/D?
g
ifosfamide
urokinase
so it is also displaying information about the second medication because 6314 is also contained in the columns for doseage.
Using bash
To match 6314 but only if it starts in column 6 using just bash, try:
$ while read -r line; do [[ "$line" =~ ^.{5}6314 ]] && echo "$line"; done <infile
commA6314 ifosfamide 30
This reads lines from the file one-by-one. The line is echoed to output only if it matches the regex ^.{5}6314 which requires that 6314 appear starting at the sixth character from the start of the line.
To print just the second word on the line but only if the first word matches your number position six:
$ while read -r code name extra; do [[ "$code" =~ ^.{5}6314 ]] && echo "$name"; done <infile
ifosfamide
Using grep
To match 6314 but only if it starts in column 6, try:
$ grep -E '^.{5}6314' infile
commA6314 ifosfamide 30
Here, ^ specifies the beginning of a line and .{5} matches any five characters. Thus ^.{5}6314 matches 6314 but only if it starts as the sixth character on the line.
Using awk
$ awk '"6314" == substr($0, 6, 4)' infile
commA6314 ifosfamide 30
Here, substr($0, 6, 4) selects four characters from the line starting at the sixth. If this equals 6314, then the line is printed.
Using sed
$ sed -En '/^.{5}6314/p' infile
commA6314 ifosfamide 30
-n tells sed not to print unless we explicitly ask it to. /^.{5}6314/p tells sed to print any line that, starting at the sixth character, matches 6314.
Try this using just bash :
while read -r line; do
[[ ${line%% *} == *6314* ]] && echo "$line"
done < input_file
It search only in the medication column.
explanations
${line%% *}
is a bash parameter expansion, it keep only the first 'word' before the first space
I want to extract the first column of the last line of a text file. Instead of output the content of interest in another file and read it in again, can I just use some command to read it into a variable directly?
For exampole, if my file is like this:
...
123 456 789(this is the last line)
What I want is to read 123 into a variable in my shell script. How can I do that?
One approach is to extract the line you want, read its columns into an array, and emit the array element you want.
For the last line:
#!/bin/bash
# ^^^^- not /bin/sh, to enable arrays and process substitution
read -r -a columns < <(tail -n 1 "$filename") # put last line's columns into an array
echo "${columns[0]}" # emit the first column
Alternately, awk is an appropriate tool for the job:
line=2
column=1
var=$(awk -v line="$line" -v col="$column" 'NR == line { print $col }' <"$filename")
echo "Extracted the value: $var"
That said, if you're looking for a line close to the start of a file, it's often faster (in a runtime-performance sense) and easier to stick to shell builtins. For instance, to take the third column of the second line of a file:
{
read -r _ # throw away first line
read -r _ _ value _ # extract third value of second line
} <"$filename"
This works by using _s as placeholders for values you don't want to read.
I guess with "first column", you mean "first word", do you?
If it is guaranteed, that the last line doesn't start with a space, you can do
tail -n 1 YOUR_FILE | cut -d ' ' -f 1
You could also use sed:
$> var=$(sed -nr '$s/(^[^ ]*).*/\1/p' "file.txt")
The -nr tells sed to not output data by default (-n) and use extended regular expressions (-r to avoid needing to escape the paranthesis otherwise you have to write \( \))). The $ is an address that specifies the last line. The regular expression anchors the beginning of the line with the first ^, then matches everything that is not a space [^ ]* and puts that the result into a capture group ( ) and then gets rid of the rest of the line .* by replacing the line with the capture group \1, then print p to print the line.