scanning the contents of a variable

[Bryan D. Quinn]

Ok, this seems like it should be really easy, but I can not for the life of me figure it out.

What I am trying to do is this: I have a variable which contains a long string like the following.

VAR="Some text. Some more text. Even more text."

What I want to do is scan or grep the contents for a certain set of characters. Just like I was grepping a file for a certain string.

What, if anything, am I missing here?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
-Bryan

[Rick Garland]

echo $VAR | grep some_pattern

echo the contents the the $VAR then pipe that through grep

[Mel Burslan · Accepted solution]

If you want to locate where the substring is located with respect to the start of the string, I am not sure if it can be done via simple ksh but substr() function in perl is what you need.

if you are only concerned that if the string contains the substring you are looking for in a binary manner, i.e. "yes it contains" or "no it doesn't contain"

echo $string | grep -q $substring
r=${?}

if [ $r -eq 0 ]
then
echo "Substring was in the string"
else
echo "String sis not contain any of substring"
fi


hope this helps

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
echo $VAR |grep
echo $VAR |awk ' /

[Pete Randall]

Bryan,

Not sure what you're looking for in your results - does this do anything for you:

VAR="Some text. Some more text. Even more text."

echo $VAR |grep text


Pete

[Doug O'Leary]

Hey;

My $.02...

echo "${var}" | grep "$text" > /dev/null 2>&1
[[ $? -eq 0 ]] && echo "Text found" || echo "Text NOT FOUND"

HTH;

Doug

[Bryan D. Quinn]

Pete,

I did the

echo $VAR | grep 'text'

option and it just returned the entire contents of the variable. As if it only did the echo portion of the command. I will try it again, maybe I fat fingered something.

-Bryan

[Mel Burslan]

it is the expected result, i.e., return the whole line contaning the substring you are looking for.

what did you expect to get instead ?

[RAC_1]

echo ${var} | tr " " "\n" | grep -i 'text'

[Bryan D. Quinn]

Well heck Mel...you have just showed me the error of my ways!

I guess I was expecting it to output just the text it was grepping for!

D'oh! Thanks to everybody who responded.

Special thanks to Mel and Doug for providing me with a means for getting the result I was looking for. If I would have really thought about what I was doing I would not have had to post in the first place.

Thanks!
-Bryan