Re: how to search/replace text in mutliple files?

Trevor Smith wrote:

Man, 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.)

According to the manual on grep [man grep], '[:space:]' should be used to search for a space

$ cat test.file
some words
some other words
some     words
$ grep "e[[:space:]]*w" test.file
some words
some     words

HTH...

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