I have to search for a string in a file like below using grep which is not working as expected.
It's just a simple search of the string, but not sure why it is not working
echo "Naizhu NZ1020 Lady Necklace Sexy Tcollarbone Chain Alloy PlatingSilver" | grep "Lady Necklace"
Can somebody help me here why it's not working, want to know the reason
The command grep will print the whole line matching the pattern.
So
echo "Naizhu NZ1020 Lady Necklace Sexy Tcollarbone Chain Alloy PlatingSilver" | grep "Lady Necklace"
will give you
Naizhu NZ1020 Lady Necklace Sexy Tcollarbone Chain Alloy PlatingSilver
You might use grep -o or --only-matching to
Print only the matched (non-empty) parts of a matching line, with each
such part on a separate output line.
and to get only
Lady Necklace
Within the comments of the question it was mentioned that a file is used for input. Since the encoding of that is unknown currently, you may also try use character classes
grep -o "Lady[[:space:]]Necklace"
Please see man grep for more options.
You should also have a look into your input file and if the words you like to lookup are in the same line and separated with a space and not with other not printable characters.
Related
Is there a way to make grep output "words" from files that match the search expression?
If I want to find all the instances of, say, "th" in a number of files, I can do:
grep "th" *
but the output will be something like (bold is by me);
some-text-file : the cat sat on the mat
some-other-text-file : the quick brown fox
yet-another-text-file : i hope this explains it thoroughly
What I want it to output, using the same search, is:
the
the
the
this
thoroughly
Is this possible using grep? Or using another combination of tools?
Try grep -o:
grep -oh "\w*th\w*" *
Edit: matching from Phil's comment.
From the docs:
-h, --no-filename
Suppress the prefixing of file names on output. This is the default
when there is only one file (or only standard input) to search.
-o, --only-matching
Print only the matched (non-empty) parts of a matching line,
with each such part on a separate output line.
Cross distribution safe answer (including windows minGW?)
grep -h "[[:alpha:]]*th[[:alpha:]]*" 'filename' | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -h "[[:alpha:]]*th[[:alpha:]]*"
If you're using older versions of grep (like 2.4.2) which do not include the -o option, then use the above. Else use the simpler to maintain version below.
Linux cross distribution safe answer
grep -oh "[[:alpha:]]*th[[:alpha:]]*" 'filename'
To summarize: -oh outputs the regular expression matches to the file content (and not its filename), just like how you would expect a regular expression to work in vim/etc... What word or regular expression you would be searching for then, is up to you! As long as you remain with POSIX and not perl syntax (refer below)
More from the manual for grep
-o Print each match, but only the match, not the entire line.
-h Never print filename headers (i.e. filenames) with output lines.
-w The expression is searched for as a word (as if surrounded by
`[[:<:]]' and `[[:>:]]';
The reason why the original answer does not work for everyone
The usage of \w varies from platform to platform, as it's an extended "perl" syntax. As such, those grep installations that are limited to work with POSIX character classes use [[:alpha:]] and not its perl equivalent of \w. See the Wikipedia page on regular expression for more
Ultimately, the POSIX answer above will be a lot more reliable regardless of platform (being the original) for grep
As for support of grep without -o option, the first grep outputs the relevant lines, the tr splits the spaces to new lines, the final grep filters only for the respective lines.
(PS: I know most platforms by now would have been patched for \w.... but there are always those that lag behind)
Credit for the "-o" workaround from #AdamRosenfield answer
It's more simple than you think. Try this:
egrep -wo 'th.[a-z]*' filename.txt #### (Case Sensitive)
egrep -iwo 'th.[a-z]*' filename.txt ### (Case Insensitive)
Where,
egrep: Grep will work with extended regular expression.
w : Matches only word/words instead of substring.
o : Display only matched pattern instead of whole line.
i : If u want to ignore case sensitivity.
You could translate spaces to newlines and then grep, e.g.:
cat * | tr ' ' '\n' | grep th
Just awk, no need combination of tools.
# awk '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){if($i~/^th/){print $i}}}' file
the
the
the
this
thoroughly
grep command for only matching and perl
grep -o -P 'th.*? ' filename
I was unsatisfied with awk's hard to remember syntax but I liked the idea of using one utility to do this.
It seems like ack (or ack-grep if you use Ubuntu) can do this easily:
# ack-grep -ho "\bth.*?\b" *
the
the
the
this
thoroughly
If you omit the -h flag you get:
# ack-grep -o "\bth.*?\b" *
some-other-text-file
1:the
some-text-file
1:the
the
yet-another-text-file
1:this
thoroughly
As a bonus, you can use the --output flag to do this for more complex searches with just about the easiest syntax I've found:
# echo "bug: 1, id: 5, time: 12/27/2010" > test-file
# ack-grep -ho "bug: (\d*), id: (\d*), time: (.*)" --output '$1, $2, $3' test-file
1, 5, 12/27/2010
cat *-text-file | grep -Eio "th[a-z]+"
You can also try pcregrep. There is also a -w option in grep, but in some cases it doesn't work as expected.
From Wikipedia:
cat fruitlist.txt
apple
apples
pineapple
apple-
apple-fruit
fruit-apple
grep -w apple fruitlist.txt
apple
apple-
apple-fruit
fruit-apple
I had a similar problem, looking for grep/pattern regex and the "matched pattern found" as output.
At the end I used egrep (same regex on grep -e or -G didn't give me the same result of egrep) with the option -o
so, I think that could be something similar to (I'm NOT a regex Master) :
egrep -o "the*|this{1}|thoroughly{1}" filename
To search all the words with start with "icon-" the following command works perfect. I am using Ack here which is similar to grep but with better options and nice formatting.
ack -oh --type=html "\w*icon-\w*" | sort | uniq
You could pipe your grep output into Perl like this:
grep "th" * | perl -n -e'while(/(\w*th\w*)/g) {print "$1\n"}'
grep --color -o -E "Begin.{0,}?End" file.txt
? - Match as few as possible until the End
Tested on macos terminal
$ grep -w
Excerpt from grep man page:
-w: 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.
ripgrep
Here are the example using ripgrep:
rg -o "(\w+)?th(\w+)?"
It'll match all words matching th.
I would like to search file.txt with grep to locate a url ending with. ".doc". When it finds .doc, I want grep to go backwards and find "http://" at the begining of that string.
The output would be http://somesite.com/random-code-that-changes-daily/somefilename.doc
There is only 1 .doc url on this page, so multiple search results should not be an issue.
Please excuse, I am a novice. I did locate the answer at one time but search for 1 hour and can no longer find. I am willing to read and learn but I do not think I'm using the correct search terms for what I want to do. Thank you.
You can use regular expressions,
with the marker ^ you can indicate the start of the line you are looking for.
with the marker $ you can indicate the end of the line you are looking for.
then, you can do something like
grep '^http:\\' \ '.doc$' file.txt
or
grep '^http://\|.doc$' file.txt
or not using regular expressions but just a matching pattern with wildcards as #choroba suggested:
grep 'http://.*\.doc' file.txt
You can also search for http:// and print the line if it contains .doc somewhere after it:
grep 'http://.*\.doc' file.txt
If you want to only print the matching part, use the -o option (if your version of grep supports it).
Related question: How do I find all files containing specific text on Linux?
I have been using the command mentioned in the answer of above question to search for string occurences in all files:
grep -rnw '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
However lately I encountered a problem, shown in the following picture:
Looks like this command only recognizes strings that stand out as a word or something. How should I modify the command to improve my search result?
explainshell helpfully explains your command, and gives an excerpt from man grep:
-w, --word-regexp
Select only those lines containing matches that form whole words.
So just remove -w since that explicitly does what you don't want:
grep -rn '/path/to/somewhere/' -e "pattern"
I have command in Grep:
cat nastava.html | grep '<td>[A-Z a-z]*</td><td>[0-9/]*</td>' | sed 's/[ \t]*<td>\([A-Z a-z]*\)<\/td><td>\([0-9]\{1,3\}\)\/[0-9]\{2\}\([0-9]\{2\}\)<\/td>.*/\1 mi\3\2 /'
|sort|grep -n ".*" | sed -r 's/(.*):(.*)/\1. \2/' >studenti.txt
I don't understand second line, sort is ok, grep -n means to num that sorted list, but why do we use here ".*"? It won't work without it, and i don't understand why.
The grep is used purely for the side effect of the line numbering with the -n option here, so the main thing is really to use a regular expression which matches all the input lines. As such, .* is not very elegant -- ^ would work without scanning every line, and $ trivially matches every line as well. Since you know the input lines are not empty, thus contain at least one character, the simple regular expression . would work perfectly, too.
However, as the end goal is to perform line numbering, a better solution is to use a dedicated tool for this purpose.
... | sort | nl -ba -s '. '
The -ba option specifies to number all lines (the default is to only add a line number to non-empty lines; we know there are no empty lines, so it's not strictly necessary here, but it's good to know) and the -s option specifies the separator string to put after the number.
A possible minor complication is that the line number format is whitespace-padded, so in the end, this solution may not work for you if you specifically want unpadded numbers. (But a sed postprocessor to fix that up is a lot simpler than the postprocessor for grep you have now -- just sed 's/^ *//' will remove leading whitespace).
... As an aside, the ugly cat | grep | sed pipeline can be abbreviated to just
sed -n 's%[ \t]*<td>\([A-Z a-z]*\)</td><td>\([0-9]\{1,3\}\)/[0-9]\{2\}\([0-9]\{2\}\)</td>.*%\1 mi\3\2 %p' nastava.html
The cat was never necessary in the first place, and the sed script can easily be refactored to only print when a substitution was performed (your grep regular expression was not exactly equivalent to the one you have in the sed script but I assume that was the intent). Also, using a different separator avoids having to backslash the slashes.
... And of course, if nastava.html is your own web page, the whole process is umop apisdn. You should have the students results in a machine-readable form, and generate a web page from that, rather than the other way around.
grep needs a regular expression to match. You can't run grep with no expression at all. If you want to number all the lines, just specify an expression that matches anything. I'd probably use ^ instead of .*.
This question already has answers here:
Colorized grep -- viewing the entire file with highlighted matches
(24 answers)
Closed 7 years ago.
When using grep, it will highlight any text in a line with a match to your regular expression.
What if I want this behaviour, but have grep print out all lines as well? I came up empty after a quick look through the grep man page.
Use ack. Checkout its --passthru option here: ack. It has the added benefit of allowing full perl regular expressions.
$ ack --passthru 'pattern1' file_name
$ command_here | ack --passthru 'pattern1'
You can also do it using grep like this:
$ grep --color -E '^|pattern1|pattern2' file_name
$ command_here | grep --color -E '^|pattern1|pattern2'
This will match all lines and highlight the patterns. The ^ matches every start of line, but won't get printed/highlighted since it's not a character.
(Note that most of the setups will use --color by default. You may not need that flag).
You can make sure that all lines match but there is nothing to highlight on irrelevant matches
egrep --color 'apple|' test.txt
Notes:
egrep may be spelled also grep -E
--color is usually default in most distributions
some variants of grep will "optimize" the empty match, so you might want to use "apple|$" instead (see: https://stackoverflow.com/a/13979036/939457)
EDIT:
This works with OS X Mountain Lion's grep:
grep --color -E 'pattern1|pattern2|$'
This is better than '^|pattern1|pattern2' because the ^ part of the alternation matches at the beginning of the line whereas the $ matches at the end of the line. Some regular expression engines won't highlight pattern1 or pattern2 because ^ already matched and the engine is eager.
Something similar happens for 'pattern1|pattern2|' because the regex engine notices the empty alternation at the end of the pattern string matches the beginning of the subject string.
[1]: http://www.regular-expressions.info/engine.html
FIRST EDIT:
I ended up using perl:
perl -pe 's:pattern:\033[31;1m$&\033[30;0m:g'
This assumes you have an ANSI-compatible terminal.
ORIGINAL ANSWER:
If you're stuck with a strange grep, this might work:
grep -E --color=always -A500 -B500 'pattern1|pattern2' | grep -v '^--'
Adjust the numbers to get all the lines you want.
The second grep just removes extraneous -- lines inserted by the BSD-style grep on Mac OS X Mountain Lion, even when the context of consecutive matches overlap.
I thought GNU grep omitted the -- lines when context overlaps, but it's been awhile so maybe I remember wrong.
You can use my highlight script from https://github.com/kepkin/dev-shell-essentials
It's better than grep cause you can highlight each match with it's own color.
$ command_here | highlight green "input" | highlight red "output"
Since you want matches highlighted, this is probably for human consumption (as opposed to piping to another program for instance), so a nice solution would be to use:
less -p <your-pattern> <your-file>
And if you don't care about case sensitivity:
less -i -p <your-pattern> <your-file>
This also has the advantage of having pages, which is nice when having to go through a long output
You can do it using only grep by:
reading the file line by line
matching a pattern in each line and highlighting pattern by grep
if there is no match, echo the line as is
which gives you the following:
while read line ; do (echo $line | grep PATTERN) || echo $line ; done < inputfile
If you want to print "all" lines, there is a simple working solution:
grep "test" -A 9999999 -B 9999999
A => After
B => Before
If you are doing this because you want more context in your search, you can do this:
cat BIG_FILE.txt | less
Doing a search in less should highlight your search terms.
Or pipe the output to your favorite editor. One example:
cat BIG_FILE.txt | vim -
Then search/highlight/replace.
If you are looking for a pattern in a directory recursively, you can either first save it to file.
ls -1R ./ | list-of-files.txt
And then grep that, or pipe it to the grep search
ls -1R | grep --color -rE '[A-Z]|'
This will look of listing all files, but colour the ones with uppercase letters. If you remove the last | you will only see the matches.
I use this to find images named badly with upper case for example, but normal grep does not show the path for each file just once per directory so this way I can see context.
Maybe this is an XY problem, and what you are really trying to do is to highlight occurrences of words as they appear in your shell. If so, you may be able to use your terminal emulator for this. For instance, in Konsole, start Find (ctrl+shift+F) and type your word. The word will then be highlighted whenever it occurs in new or existing output until you cancel the function.