Windows Command to detect and remove text in a file - windows

Question

I have an ascii file and in there somewhere is the line:
BEGIN
and later on the line:
END
I'd like to be able to remove those two lines and everything in between from a command line call in windows. This needs to be completely automated.
EDIT: See sed in Vista - how to delete all symbols between? for details on how to use sed to do this (cygwin has sed).
EDIT: I am finding that SED could be working but when I pipe the output to a file, the carriage returns have been removed. How can I keep these? Using this sed regex:
/^GlobalSection(TeamFoundationVersionControl) = preSolution$/,/^EndGlobalSection$/{
/^GlobalSection(TeamFoundationVersionControl) = preSolution$/!{
/^EndGlobalSection$/!d
}
}
.. where the start section is 'GlobalSection(TeamFoundationVersionControl) = preSolution' and the end section is 'EndGlobalSection'. I'd also like to delete these lines as well.
EDIT: I am now using something simpler for sed:
/^GlobalSection(TeamFoundationVersionControl) = preSolution$/,/^EndGlobalSection$/d
The line feeds are still an issue though

Answer 1

Alternately, what I use these days is a scripting language that plays nicely with windows like Ruby or Python for such tasks. Ruby is easy to install in windows and makes problems like this child's play.
Here's a script you could use like:
cutBeginEnd.rb myFileName.txt
sourcefile = File.open(ARGV[0])
# Get the string and do a multiline replace
fileString = sourceFile.read()
slicedString = fileString.gsub(/BEGIN.*END\n/m,"")
#Overwrite the file
sourcefile.pos = 0
sourcefile.print slicedString
sourcefile.truncate(f.pos)
This does a pretty good job, allows for a lot of flexiblity, and is possibly more readable than sed.

Answer 2

Here is a 1-line Perl command that does what you want (just type it from the Command Prompt window):
perl -i.bak -ne "print unless /^BEGIN\r?\n/ .. /^END\r?\n/" myfile.txt
Carriage returns and line feeds will be preserved properly. The original version of myfile.txt will be saved as myfile.txt.bak.
If you don't have Perl installed, get ActivePerl.

Answer 3

Here's how to delete the entire GlobalSection(TeamFoundationVersionControl) = preSolution section using a C# regular expression:
// Create a regex to match against an entire GlobalSection(TeamFoundationVersionControl) section so that it can be removed (including preceding and trailing whitespace).
// The symbols *, +, and ? are greedy by default and will match everything until the LAST occurrence of EndGlobalSection, so we must use their non-greedy counterparts, *?, +?, and ??.
// Example of string to match against: " GlobalSection(TeamFoundationVersionControl) ...... EndGlobalSection "
Regex _regex = new Regex(#"(?i:\s*?GlobalSection\(TeamFoundationVersionControl\)(?:.|\n)*?EndGlobalSection\s*?)", RegexOptions.Compiled);