Trevor Smith wrote:
According to the manual on grep [man grep], '[:space:]' should be used to search for a spaceMan, I am completely at a loss how to use a regex to search for whitespace.
I *want* to search and replace some complex strings in multiple HTML files but I can't even successfully SEARCH -- forget about the replace!!
Do regular expressions not actually work to find whitespace?!? I can't make them work, although the regex editor in Kate seems to do the job, when I copy even a simple regex that it produces to the command line for use with grep or egrep, they match exactly nothing.
For example, a test file named "test.file" containing:
some words some other words
produces matches with:
grep 'e w' test.file
but NO matches with:
grep 'e\sw' test.file egrep 'e\sw' test.file grep 'e[\s]w' test.file etc.
Now, that's fine if the file I'm searching has ONLY one space, but the WHOLE purpose of regexes is to allow me to search flexibly. I want to search for different lengths of whitespace, etc., but since I can't even search for ONE whitespace character successfully, I'm unable to expand my regex.
Any help? (Eventually I was going to build the regex to look for space/tab/newline characters.)
$ cat test.file some words some other words some words $ grep "e[[:space:]]*w" test.file some words some words
HTH...
-- Keven Ring | They called it Paradise Lead Software Systems Engineer | I don't know why... The MITRE Corporation | When you call someplace Paradise (703)883-7026 | Kiss it goodbye....
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