Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim (2012)

Re:Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim ... by shmerl on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @01:37AM (#8100854)

I prefer pcregrep, it's more feature rich and syntax is much neater. Using \d instead of [0-9] and etc. makes regexes more readable.

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Re:Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim ... by chubot on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @02:00AM (#8100906)

Is that any different than grep --perl (should be available most places GNU grep is)? I use that for complex regexes.

For even longer ones I just started using perl with /x, so you can uses insignificant whitespace and comments.

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Re:Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim ... by shmerl on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @02:53AM (#8101005)

I didn't really compare, since grep marks --perl as "highly experimental". pcregrep on the other hand is around for a long time already.

One very useful feature in pcregrep is outputting the matched subpattern only. For example if you do:

    echo 'abcdefg' | pcregrep -o2  'a(bc)d(ef)g'

It will output only second matched subpattern.

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Re:Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim ... by oweiler on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @01:56AM (#8100891)

And depending on the context makes them wrong. \d is not equivalent to [0-9].

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Re:Sculpting text with regex, grep, sed, awk, emacs and vim ... by shmerl on Tuesday July 29, 2014 @02:44AM (#8100987)

Not only if it uses different locales. Normally it is equal to [0-9]. Don't even start on Unicode and regexes.

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