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Lecture 06

The document provides an overview of regular expressions (regex) and examples of how they can be used with grep. It defines regex as patterns that can test if a string matches and be used for search/replace. It then provides examples of basic regex syntax like wildcards, quantifiers, character classes and grouping. It demonstrates how to use grep with options like -c, -i, and -E extended regex. The document is an introduction to regex and how they can be used with grep for text searching and matching.

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24 views13 pages

Lecture 06

The document provides an overview of regular expressions (regex) and examples of how they can be used with grep. It defines regex as patterns that can test if a string matches and be used for search/replace. It then provides examples of basic regex syntax like wildcards, quantifiers, character classes and grouping. It demonstrates how to use grep with options like -c, -i, and -E extended regex. The document is an introduction to regex and how they can be used with grep for text searching and matching.

Uploaded by

dire
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Lecture 6: Regex
CSE 374: Intermediate
Programming Concepts and
Tools

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Regular Expressions!
/^[a-zA-Z_\-]+@(([a-zA-Z_\-])+\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,4}$/

Regular expression ("regex"): a description of a pattern of text


● Can test whether a string matches the expression's pattern
● Can use a regex to search/replace characters in a string
Regular expressions are extremely power but tough to read (the above regular
expression matches email addresses)
Regular expressions occur in many places:
● Java: Scanner, String's split method (CSE 143 random grammar generator)
● Supported by HTML5, JS, Java, Python, PHP, and other languages
● Many text editors (TextPad, Sublime, Vim, etc.) allow regexes in search/replace
● The site Rubular is useful for testing a regex

https://regex101.com/ https://regexcrossword.com/ https://regexone.com/


Glob patterns
▪Syntax to replace a pattern with a list of file names that all match that pattern
- Enables you to pass multiple file names as arguments without typing them out individually
- Pattern matches are based on location within file directory

▪Wildcard - * - anything goes here


- EX: echo src/*
- Src/file1.txt src/file2.txt src/file3.txt
- Example uses
- echo * - prints every file/folder in current directory
- echo *.txt - finds all files with that extension within directory
- echo /bin/python* - finds all files within that path because they start with that string
- cp src/* dest/ - copies all files from one directory to another
- find –name ‘*.txt’ recursively finds files ending in .txt

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Basic Regular Expression
/abc/

The simplest regexes simply match a particular substring


The above regular expression matches any string containing "abc"
● Match: "abc", "abcdef", "defabc", ".=.abc.=.", ...
● Don't Match: "fedcba", "ab c", "PHP", …
Wildcards, Case sensitivity
A .matches any character except a \n line break
● /.ax../ matches "Faxes", "Jaxes", "Taxes", "maxie", etc.

A trailing i at the end of a regex (after the closing /) signifies a case-insensitive match
● /cal/i matches "Pascal", "California", "GCal", etc.
Quantifiers: *, +, ?
* means 0 or more occurrences
● /abc*/ matches "ab", "abc", "abcc", "abccc", ...
● /a(bc)*/ matches "a", "abc", "abcbc", "abcbcbc", ...
● /a.*a/ matches "aa", "aba", "a8qa", "a!?xyz__9a", ...
+ means 1 or more occurrences
● /Hi!+ there/ matches "Hi! there", "Hi!!! there!", ...
● /a(bc)+/ matches "abc", "abcbc", "abcbcbc", ...
? means 0 or 1 occurrences
● /a(bc)?/ matches only "a" or "abc"
Regex special characters
\ - escape following character () – groups patterns for order of operations
. – matches any single character at least once [] – contains literals to be matched, single or range
• c.t matches {cat, cut, cota} • [a-b] matches all lowercase letters
| - or, enables multiple patterns to match against ^ - anchors to beginning of line
• a|b matches {a} or {b} • ^// matches lines that start with //
* - matches 0 or more of the previous pattern (greedy match)
$ - anchors to end of line
• a* matches {, a, aa, aaa, …} • ;$ matches lines that end with ;
? – matches 0 or 1 of the previous pattern
• a? matches {, a}
+ - matches one or more of previous pattern
• a+ matches {a, aa, aaa, …}
{n} – matches exactly n repetitions of the preceding
• a{3} matches {aaa}
Character ranges: [start-end]
Inside a character set, specify a range of characters with -
● /[a-z]/ matches any lowercase letter
● /[a-zA-Z0-9]/ matches any lowercase or uppercase letter or digit
Inside a character set, - must be escaped to be matched
● /[+\-]?[0-9]+/ matches an optional + or -, followed by at least one digit

Practice: Write a regex for Student ID numbers that are exactly 7 digits and start with a 1
-- Pass --
1234567

-- Fail --
7654321
123abcd
123

1[0-9]{6}
grep with options
grep [options] [pattern] [file]

grep -c "string" FILENAME # -c count number of matches

grep -i "string" FILENAME # -i case insensitive

grep -w "string" FILENAME # -w checks for words and not substrings

grep -A <N> "string" FILENAME # -A prints N lines after match

grep -B <N> "string" FILENAME # -B prints N lines before match

grep -r "string" * # -r recursive search from current directory

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grep with regex
▪Useful Regex Patterns
- [a-zA-Z] - matches all English letters
- [0-9]* - matches list of numbers
- (abc)* - match any number of “abc”s
- (foo | bar) – matches either “foo” or “bar”

- grep “^hello” file1 #Match all lines that start with ‘hello’
- grep “done$” file1 #Match all lines that end with ‘done’
- grep “[a-e]” file1 #Match all lines that contain any of the letters a-e
- grep “ *[0-9]” file1 #Match all lines that start with a digit following
zero or more spaces. E.g: “ 1.” or “2.”

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Extended Regex
grep –E uses “extended” regex
- In basic regular expressions the meta-characters ?, +, {, |, (, and ) lose their special meaning; instead use
the backslashed versions \?, \+, \{, \|, \(, and \).
- Traditional egrep did not support the { meta-character, and some egrep implementations support \
{ instead, so portable scripts should avoid { in grep -E patterns and should use [{] to match a literal {.
- Also grep -e allows to use several strings for searching: 'grep -e 'abc' -e 'def' -e '123' will look for any of the
three of these strings: abc as well as def and 123.

grep -E '^[A-Z].*[.,]$' file.txt

- match all lines that start with a capital letter and end with either period or comma
- .* matches any number of any character

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17130299/whats-the-difference-between-grep-e-and-grep-e 12
Grep regex demo
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