i found many similar questions about my issue but i still don't find the correct one for me.
I need to grep for the content of a variable plus a dot but it doesn't run escaping the dot after the variable. For example:
The file content is
item.
newitem.
My variable content is item. and i want to grep for the exact word, therefore I must use -w and not -F but with the command I can't obtain the correct output:
cat file | grep -w "$variable\."
Do you have suggestions please?
Hi, I have to rectify my scenario. My file contains some FQDN and for some reasons I have to look for hostname. with the dot.
Unfortunatelly the grep -wF doesn't run:
My file is
hostname1.domain.com
hostname2.domain.com
and the command
cat file | grep -wF hostname1.
doesn't show any output. I have to find another solution and I'm not sure that grep could help.
If $variable contains item., you're searching for item.\. which is not what you want. In fact, you want -F which interprets the pattern literally, not as a regular expression.
var=item.
echo $'item.\nnewitem.' | grep -F "$var"
Try:
grep "\b$word\."
\b: word boundary
\.: the dot itself is a word boundary
Following awk solution may help you in same.
awk -v var="item." '$0==var' Input_file
You are dereferencing variable and append \. to it, which results in calling
cat file | grep -w "item.\.".
Since grep accepts files as parameter, calling grep "item\." file should do.
from man grep
-w, --word-regexp
Select only those lines containing matches that form whole words. The test is that the matching substring must either be at the beginning of the line, or preceded by a non-word constituent
character. Similarly, it must be either at the end of the line or followed by a non-word constituent character. Word-constituent characters are letters, digits, and the underscore.
and
The Backslash Character and Special Expressions
The symbols \< and \> respectively match the empty string at the beginning and end of a word. The symbol \b matches the empty string at the edge of a word, and \B matches the empty string
provided it's not at the edge of a word. The symbol \w is a synonym for [[:alnum:]] and \W is a synonym for [^[:alnum:]].
as the last character is a . it must be followed by a non word [A-Za-z0-9_] however the next character is d
grep '\<hostname1\.'
should work as \< ensures previous chracter is not a word constituent.
You can dynamically construct the search pattern and then call grep
rexp='^hostname1\.'
grep "$rexp" file.txt
The single quotes tell bash not to interpret special characters in the variable. Double quotes tell bash to allow replacing $rexp with its value. The caret ( ^ ) in the expression tells grep to look for lines starting with 'hostname1.'
I have to find words.
In my assignment a word is defined as letters between two spaces (" bla "). I have to find a decimalIntegerConstant like this but it has to be a word.
I use
grep -E -o " (0|[1-9]+[0-9]*)([Ll]?) "
but it doesn't work on, for example:
bla 0l labl 2 3 abla0La 0L sfdgpočítačsd
Output is
0l
2
0L
but 3 is missing.
Matches don't overlap. Your regex have matched 2. The blank after 2 is gone. It won't be considered for further matches.
POSIX grep cannot do what you want in one step, but you can do something like this in two stages (simplified from your regex, doesn't support [lL])
grep -o ' [0-9 ]* ' | grep -E -o '[0-9]+'
That is, match a sequence of space-separated numbers with leading and trailing spaces, and from that, match individual numbers regardless of spaces. De-simplify the definition of number to suit your needs.
Perl-compatible regular expressions have a way to match stuff without consuming it, for example, as mentioned in the comments:
grep -oP " (0|[1-9]+[0-9]*)[Ll]?(?= )"
(?= ) is a lookahead assertion, which means grep will look ahead in the input stream and make sure the match is followed by a space. The space will not be considered a part of the match and will not be consumed. When no space is found, the match fails.
PCRE are not guaranteed to work in all implementations of grep.
Edit: -o is not specified by Posix either.
I'm trying to use sed to clean up lines of URLs to extract just the domain.
So from:
http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/
I want:
http://www.suepearson.co.uk/
(either with or without the trailing slash, it doesn't matter)
I have tried:
sed 's|\(http:\/\/.*?\/\).*|\1|'
and (escaping the non-greedy quantifier)
sed 's|\(http:\/\/.*\?\/\).*|\1|'
but I can not seem to get the non-greedy quantifier (?) to work, so it always ends up matching the whole string.
Neither basic nor extended Posix/GNU regex recognizes the non-greedy quantifier; you need a later regex. Fortunately, Perl regex for this context is pretty easy to get:
perl -pe 's|(http://.*?/).*|\1|'
In this specific case, you can get the job done without using a non-greedy regex.
Try this non-greedy regex [^/]* instead of .*?:
sed 's|\(http://[^/]*/\).*|\1|g'
With sed, I usually implement non-greedy search by searching for anything except the separator until the separator :
echo "http://www.suon.co.uk/product/1/7/3/" | sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*\)/.*;\1;p'
Output:
http://www.suon.co.uk
this is:
don't output -n
search, match pattern, replace and print s/<pattern>/<replace>/p
use ; search command separator instead of / to make it easier to type so s;<pattern>;<replace>;p
remember match between brackets \( ... \), later accessible with \1,\2...
match http://
followed by anything in brackets [], [ab/] would mean either a or b or /
first ^ in [] means not, so followed by anything but the thing in the []
so [^/] means anything except / character
* is to repeat previous group so [^/]* means characters except /.
so far sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*\) means search and remember http://followed by any characters except / and remember what you've found
we want to search untill the end of domain so stop on the next / so add another / at the end: sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*\)/' but we want to match the rest of the line after the domain so add .*
now the match remembered in group 1 (\1) is the domain so replace matched line with stuff saved in group \1 and print: sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*\)/.*;\1;p'
If you want to include backslash after the domain as well, then add one more backslash in the group to remember:
echo "http://www.suon.co.uk/product/1/7/3/" | sed -n 's;\(http://[^/]*/\).*;\1;p'
output:
http://www.suon.co.uk/
Simulating lazy (un-greedy) quantifier in sed
And all other regex flavors!
Finding first occurrence of an expression:
POSIX ERE (using -r option)
Regex:
(EXPRESSION).*|.
Sed:
sed -r 's/(EXPRESSION).*|./\1/g' # Global `g` modifier should be on
Example (finding first sequence of digits) Live demo:
$ sed -r 's/([0-9]+).*|./\1/g' <<< 'foo 12 bar 34'
12
How does it work?
This regex benefits from an alternation |. At each position engine tries to pick the longest match (this is a POSIX standard which is followed by couple of other engines as well) which means it goes with . until a match is found for ([0-9]+).*. But order is important too.
Since global flag is set, engine tries to continue matching character by character up to the end of input string or our target. As soon as the first and only capturing group of left side of alternation is matched (EXPRESSION) rest of line is consumed immediately as well .*. We now hold our value in the first capturing group.
POSIX BRE
Regex:
\(\(\(EXPRESSION\).*\)*.\)*
Sed:
sed 's/\(\(\(EXPRESSION\).*\)*.\)*/\3/'
Example (finding first sequence of digits):
$ sed 's/\(\(\([0-9]\{1,\}\).*\)*.\)*/\3/' <<< 'foo 12 bar 34'
12
This one is like ERE version but with no alternation involved. That's all. At each single position engine tries to match a digit.
If it is found, other following digits are consumed and captured and the rest of line is matched immediately otherwise since * means
more or zero it skips over second capturing group \(\([0-9]\{1,\}\).*\)* and arrives at a dot . to match a single character and this process continues.
Finding first occurrence of a delimited expression:
This approach will match the very first occurrence of a string that is delimited. We can call it a block of string.
sed 's/\(END-DELIMITER-EXPRESSION\).*/\1/; \
s/\(\(START-DELIMITER-EXPRESSION.*\)*.\)*/\1/g'
Input string:
foobar start block #1 end barfoo start block #2 end
-EDE: end
-SDE: start
$ sed 's/\(end\).*/\1/; s/\(\(start.*\)*.\)*/\1/g'
Output:
start block #1 end
First regex \(end\).* matches and captures first end delimiter end and substitues all match with recent captured characters which
is the end delimiter. At this stage our output is: foobar start block #1 end.
Then the result is passed to second regex \(\(start.*\)*.\)* that is same as POSIX BRE version above. It matches a single character
if start delimiter start is not matched otherwise it matches and captures the start delimiter and matches the rest of characters.
Directly answering your question
Using approach #2 (delimited expression) you should select two appropriate expressions:
EDE: [^:/]\/
SDE: http:
Usage:
$ sed 's/\([^:/]\/\).*/\1/g; s/\(\(http:.*\)*.\)*/\1/' <<< 'http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/'
Output:
http://www.suepearson.co.uk/
Note: this will not work with identical delimiters.
sed does not support "non greedy" operator.
You have to use "[]" operator to exclude "/" from match.
sed 's,\(http://[^/]*\)/.*,\1,'
P.S. there is no need to backslash "/".
sed - non greedy matching by Christoph Sieghart
The trick to get non greedy matching in sed is to match all characters excluding the one that terminates the match. I know, a no-brainer, but I wasted precious minutes on it and shell scripts should be, after all, quick and easy. So in case somebody else might need it:
Greedy matching
% echo "<b>foo</b>bar" | sed 's/<.*>//g'
bar
Non greedy matching
% echo "<b>foo</b>bar" | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g'
foobar
Non-greedy solution for more than a single character
This thread is really old but I assume people still needs it.
Lets say you want to kill everything till the very first occurrence of HELLO. You cannot say [^HELLO]...
So a nice solution involves two steps, assuming that you can spare a unique word that you are not expecting in the input, say top_sekrit.
In this case we can:
s/HELLO/top_sekrit/ #will only replace the very first occurrence
s/.*top_sekrit// #kill everything till end of the first HELLO
Of course, with a simpler input you could use a smaller word, or maybe even a single character.
HTH!
This can be done using cut:
echo "http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/" | cut -d'/' -f1-3
another way, not using regex, is to use fields/delimiter method eg
string="http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/"
echo $string | awk -F"/" '{print $1,$2,$3}' OFS="/"
sed certainly has its place but this not not one of them !
As Dee has pointed out: Just use cut. It is far simpler and much more safe in this case. Here's an example where we extract various components from the URL using Bash syntax:
url="http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/"
protocol=$(echo "$url" | cut -d':' -f1)
host=$(echo "$url" | cut -d'/' -f3)
urlhost=$(echo "$url" | cut -d'/' -f1-3)
urlpath=$(echo "$url" | cut -d'/' -f4-)
gives you:
protocol = "http"
host = "www.suepearson.co.uk"
urlhost = "http://www.suepearson.co.uk"
urlpath = "product/174/71/3816/"
As you can see this is a lot more flexible approach.
(all credit to Dee)
sed 's|(http:\/\/[^\/]+\/).*|\1|'
There is still hope to solve this using pure (GNU) sed. Despite this is not a generic solution in some cases you can use "loops" to eliminate all the unnecessary parts of the string like this:
sed -r -e ":loop" -e 's|(http://.+)/.*|\1|' -e "t loop"
-r: Use extended regex (for + and unescaped parenthesis)
":loop": Define a new label named "loop"
-e: add commands to sed
"t loop": Jump back to label "loop" if there was a successful substitution
The only problem here is it will also cut the last separator character ('/'), but if you really need it you can still simply put it back after the "loop" finished, just append this additional command at the end of the previous command line:
-e "s,$,/,"
sed -E interprets regular expressions as extended (modern) regular expressions
Update: -E on MacOS X, -r in GNU sed.
Because you specifically stated you're trying to use sed (instead of perl, cut, etc.), try grouping. This circumvents the non-greedy identifier potentially not being recognized. The first group is the protocol (i.e. 'http://', 'https://', 'tcp://', etc). The second group is the domain:
echo "http://www.suon.co.uk/product/1/7/3/" | sed "s|^\(.*//\)\([^/]*\).*$|\1\2|"
If you're not familiar with grouping, start here.
I realize this is an old entry, but someone may find it useful.
As the full domain name may not exceed a total length of 253 characters replace .* with .\{1, 255\}
This is how to robustly do non-greedy matching of multi-character strings using sed. Lets say you want to change every foo...bar to <foo...bar> so for example this input:
$ cat file
ABC foo DEF bar GHI foo KLM bar NOP foo QRS bar TUV
should become this output:
ABC <foo DEF bar> GHI <foo KLM bar> NOP <foo QRS bar> TUV
To do that you convert foo and bar to individual characters and then use the negation of those characters between them:
$ sed 's/#/#A/g; s/{/#B/g; s/}/#C/g; s/foo/{/g; s/bar/}/g; s/{[^{}]*}/<&>/g; s/}/bar/g; s/{/foo/g; s/#C/}/g; s/#B/{/g; s/#A/#/g' file
ABC <foo DEF bar> GHI <foo KLM bar> NOP <foo QRS bar> TUV
In the above:
s/#/#A/g; s/{/#B/g; s/}/#C/g is converting { and } to placeholder strings that cannot exist in the input so those chars then are available to convert foo and bar to.
s/foo/{/g; s/bar/}/g is converting foo and bar to { and } respectively
s/{[^{}]*}/<&>/g is performing the op we want - converting foo...bar to <foo...bar>
s/}/bar/g; s/{/foo/g is converting { and } back to foo and bar.
s/#C/}/g; s/#B/{/g; s/#A/#/g is converting the placeholder strings back to their original characters.
Note that the above does not rely on any particular string not being present in the input as it manufactures such strings in the first step, nor does it care which occurrence of any particular regexp you want to match since you can use {[^{}]*} as many times as necessary in the expression to isolate the actual match you want and/or with seds numeric match operator, e.g. to only replace the 2nd occurrence:
$ sed 's/#/#A/g; s/{/#B/g; s/}/#C/g; s/foo/{/g; s/bar/}/g; s/{[^{}]*}/<&>/2; s/}/bar/g; s/{/foo/g; s/#C/}/g; s/#B/{/g; s/#A/#/g' file
ABC foo DEF bar GHI <foo KLM bar> NOP foo QRS bar TUV
Have not yet seen this answer, so here's how you can do this with vi or vim:
vi -c '%s/\(http:\/\/.\{-}\/\).*/\1/ge | wq' file &>/dev/null
This runs the vi :%s substitution globally (the trailing g), refrains from raising an error if the pattern is not found (e), then saves the resulting changes to disk and quits. The &>/dev/null prevents the GUI from briefly flashing on screen, which can be annoying.
I like using vi sometimes for super complicated regexes, because (1) perl is dead dying, (2) vim has a very advanced regex engine, and (3) I'm already intimately familiar with vi regexes in my day-to-day usage editing documents.
Since PCRE is also tagged here, we could use GNU grep by using non-lazy match in regex .*? which will match first nearest match opposite of .*(which is really greedy and goes till last occurrence of match).
grep -oP '^http[s]?:\/\/.*?/' Input_file
Explanation: using grep's oP options here where -P is responsible for enabling PCRE regex here. In main program of grep mentioning regex which is matching starting http/https followed by :// till next occurrence of / since we have used .*? it will look for first / after (http/https://). It will print matched part only in line.
echo "/home/one/two/three/myfile.txt" | sed 's|\(.*\)/.*|\1|'
don bother, i got it on another forum :)
sed 's|\(http:\/\/www\.[a-z.0-9]*\/\).*|\1| works too
Here is something you can do with a two step approach and awk:
A=http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/
echo $A|awk '
{
var=gensub(///,"||",3,$0) ;
sub(/\|\|.*/,"",var);
print var
}'
Output:
http://www.suepearson.co.uk
Hope that helps!
Another sed version:
sed 's|/[:alnum:].*||' file.txt
It matches / followed by an alphanumeric character (so not another forward slash) as well as the rest of characters till the end of the line. Afterwards it replaces it with nothing (ie. deletes it.)
#Daniel H (concerning your comment on andcoz' answer, although long time ago): deleting trailing zeros works with
s,([[:digit:]]\.[[:digit:]]*[1-9])[0]*$,\1,g
it's about clearly defining the matching conditions ...
You should also think about the case where there is no matching delims. Do you want to output the line or not. My examples here do not output anything if there is no match.
You need prefix up to 3rd /, so select two times string of any length not containing / and following / and then string of any length not containing / and then match / following any string and then print selection. This idea works with any single char delims.
echo http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/ | \
sed -nr 's,(([^/]*/){2}[^/]*)/.*,\1,p'
Using sed commands you can do fast prefix dropping or delim selection, like:
echo 'aaa #cee: { "foo":" #cee: " }' | \
sed -r 't x;s/ #cee: /\n/;D;:x'
This is lot faster than eating char at a time.
Jump to label if successful match previously. Add \n at / before 1st delim. Remove up to first \n. If \n was added, jump to end and print.
If there is start and end delims, it is just easy to remove end delims until you reach the nth-2 element you want and then do D trick, remove after end delim, jump to delete if no match, remove before start delim and and print. This only works if start/end delims occur in pairs.
echo 'foobar start block #1 end barfoo start block #2 end bazfoo start block #3 end goo start block #4 end faa' | \
sed -r 't x;s/end//;s/end/\n/;D;:x;s/(end).*/\1/;T y;s/.*(start)/\1/;p;:y;d'
If you have access to gnu grep, then can utilize perl regex:
grep -Po '^https?://([^/]+)(?=)' <<< 'http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/'
http://www.suepearson.co.uk
Alternatively, to get everything after the domain use
grep -Po '^https?://([^/]+)\K.*' <<< 'http://www.suepearson.co.uk/product/174/71/3816/'
/product/174/71/3816/
The following solution works for matching / working with multiply present (chained; tandem; compound) HTML or other tags. For example, I wanted to edit HTML code to remove <span> tags, that appeared in tandem.
Issue: regular sed regex expressions greedily matched over all the tags from the first to the last.
Solution: non-greedy pattern matching (per discussions elsewhere in this thread; e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/a/46719361/1904943).
Example:
echo '<span>Will</span>This <span>remove</span>will <span>this.</span>remain.' | \
sed 's/<span>[^>]*>//g' ; echo
This will remain.
Explanation:
s/<span> : find <span>
[^>] : followed by anything that is not >
*> : until you find >
//g : replace any such strings present with nothing.
Addendum
I was trying to clean up URLs, but I was running into difficulty matching / excluding a word - href - using the approach above. I briefly looked at negative lookarounds (Regular expression to match a line that doesn't contain a word) but that approach seemed overly complex and did not provide a satisfactory solution.
I decided to replace href with ` (backtick), do the regex substitutions, then replace ` with href.
Example (formatted here for readability):
printf '\n
<a aaa h href="apple">apple</a>
<a bbb "c=ccc" href="banana">banana</a>
<a class="gtm-content-click"
data-vars-link-text="nope"
data-vars-click-url="https://blablabla"
data-vars-event-category="story"
data-vars-sub-category="story"
data-vars-item="in_content_link"
data-vars-link-text
href="https:example.com">Example.com</a>\n\n' |
sed 's/href/`/g ;
s/<a[^`]*`/\n<a href/g'
apple
banana
Example.com
Explanation: basically as above. Here,
s/href/` : replace href with ` (backtick)
s/<a : find start of URL
[^`] : followed by anything that is not ` (backtick)
*` : until you find a `
/<a href/g : replace each of those found with <a href
Unfortunately, as mentioned, this it is not supported in sed.
To overcome this, I suggest to use the next best thing(actually better even), to use vim sed-like capabilities.
define in .bash-profile
vimdo() { vim $2 --not-a-term -c "$1" -es +"w >> /dev/stdout" -cq! ; }
That will create headless vim to execute a command.
Now you can do for example:
echo $PATH | vimdo "%s_\c:[a-zA-Z0-9\\/]\{-}python[a-zA-Z0-9\\/]\{-}:__g" -
to filter out python in $PATH.
Use - to have input from pipe in vimdo.
While most of the syntax is the same. Vim features more advanced features, and using \{-} is standard for non-greedy match. see help regexp.
I've a file containing many number of lines like following.
== domain 1 score: 280.5 bits; conditional E-value: 2.1e-87
TSEEETTCTTTGSG---BTTSSB-HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHSSS---B-HHHHHHHSTTTSTGCGBB-HHHHHHHHHHHTEBEBTTTS---SSCSESECTTGCGSCEBEESEEEEEESSBHHHHHHHHHHHSSEEEEEECTSHHHHTEESSEESCTSCETSS-EEEEEEEEEEEETTEEEEEEE-SBTTTSTBTTEEEEESSSSSGGGTTSSEEEE CS
PF00112.18 2 pesvDwrekkgavtpvkdqgsCGsCWafsavgalegrlaiktkkklvslSeqelvdCskeenegCnGGlmenafeyikknggivtekdypYkakekgkCkkkkkkekvakikgygkvkenseealkkalakngPvsvaidaseedfqlYksGvyketecsktelnhavlivGygvengkkyWivkNsWgtdwgekGYiriargknnecgieseavyp 218
p+svD+r+k+ +vtpvk+qg+CGsCWafs+vgaleg+l+ kt +kl++lS q+lvdC + en+gC GG+m+naf+y++kn+gi++e+ ypY ++e ++C ++ + + ak++gy++++e +e+alk+a+a++gPvsvaidas ++fq+Y++Gvy++++c++++lnhavl+vGyg ++g+k Wi+kNsWg++wg+kGYi +ar+knn cgi++ a++p
1AU0:A 2 PDSVDYRKKG-YVTPVKNQGQCGSCWAFSSVGALEGQLKKKT-GKLLNLSPQNLVDCVS-ENDGCGGGYMTNAFQYVQKNRGIDSEDAYPYVGQE-ESCMYNPTGKA-AKCRGYREIPEGNEKALKRAVARVGPVSVAIDASLTSFQFYSKGVYYDESCNSDNLNHAVLAVGYGIQKGNKHWIIKNSWGENWGNKGYILMARNKNNACGIANLASFP 213
I just want to extract the line that is preceded by the PF and the associated line after it which starts with digit.
Here in this case, line that starts with PF is 'PF00112.18' and line that starts with digit is '1AU0:A'. These ids will change for next domain, but PF is constant and its associated id starts with digit.
Here is what I've tried with grep, I hope there must be mistake in this oneliner. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
grep '^ PF \| \d' inFile.txt
Expected output:
PF00112.18 2 pesvDwrekkgavtpvkdqgsCGsCWafsavgalegrlaiktkkklvslSeqelvdCskeenegCnGGlmenafeyikknggivtekdypYkakekgkCkkkkkkekvakikgygkvkenseealkkalakngPvsvaidaseedfqlYksGvyketecsktelnhavlivGygvengkkyWivkNsWgtdwgekGYiriargknnecgieseavyp 218
1AU0:A 2 PDSVDYRKKG-YVTPVKNQGQCGSCWAFSSVGALEGQLKKKT-GKLLNLSPQNLVDCVS-ENDGCGGGYMTNAFQYVQKNRGIDSEDAYPYVGQE-ESCMYNPTGKA-AKCRGYREIPEGNEKALKRAVARVGPVSVAIDASLTSFQFYSKGVYYDESCNSDNLNHAVLAVGYGIQKGNKHWIIKNSWGENWGNKGYILMARNKNNACGIANLASFP 213
You can use the following grep expression:
grep '^[[:space:]]\+PF\|^[[:space:]]\+[[:digit:]]' input.txt
The first pattern ^[[:space:]]\+PF searches for a line which contains one or more spaces at the start, followed by the term PF. The second pattern also searches for a one ore more spaces at the start at the line, but followed by a digit.
This can be simplyfied to:
grep '^[[:space:]]\+\(PF\|[[:digit:]]\)' input.txt
since both patterns start with one or more spaces at the start of the line.
Let me finally suggest to use egrep instead of grep because extended POSIX regexes will save use some escaping:
egrep '^[[:space:]]+(PF|[[:digit:]])' input.txt
egrep "^[ \t]*(PF|[0-9]).*$" tmp_file
[ \t] is equivalent to a space. Its a tab delimiter.
So ^[ \t]* grabs anything that starts with a space. The asterisk grabs all leading white space thereafter.
(PF|[0-9]).*$ will grab the lines that start with either PF or a digit. The beauty of egrep is that you can specify multiple conditions encapsulated by parenthesis, separated by a pipe.
.*$ grabs every from until the end of the line
so (PF|[0-9]).*$ will grab everything that starts with PF or digits until the end of the line. It will not work without compensating for the leading white space first.
So we get :
egrep "^[ \t]*(PF|[0-9]).*$" tmp_file