topic Re: matching exact string in Operating System - HP-UX

matching exact string

lawrenzo_1 — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 17:35:40 GMT

Hello all,

I want to match an exact string in a search so:

how do I get a system to only report on a string I specify:

my file contains say multiple strings with 50 in but I only want to display 50 and not 500 or 150 etc

any help would be great

thanks

Chris

Re: matching exact string

James R. Ferguson — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 17:51:22 GMT

Hi Chris:

# echo "500 lines\nor 50 lines \nor 55000 lines "|perl -nle 'print if /\b50\b/'
or 50 lines

This matches '50' only at boundries like whitespace or non-word characters.

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: matching exact string

A. Clay Stephenson — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 17:58:16 GMT

It would help if you specified your tool (grep, sed, awk, perl, ...) but here's the grep solution and the other RE's will be similar.

grep -e '^50 ' -e ' 50$' -e '^50$' -e ' 50 ' infile > outfile

This will find 50 at the beginning of a string followed by a space, 50 preceded by a space at the end of a string, a line containing only 50 and a 50 with spaces before and after.

Re: matching exact string

Sandman! — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 20:44:24 GMT

If you want to search and print only the string 50 then you do something like:

# egrep "[^0-9][5][0][^0-9]|^[5][0]|[5][0]$" file

Re: matching exact string

blah2blah — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 21:51:16 GMT

grep -e "[:space:]50[:space:]"

Re: matching exact string

Dennis Handly — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 23:55:16 GMT

If you want to search for an exact string you should use "grep -w 50". (Available on 11i.)

Re: matching exact string

James R. Ferguson — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:12:06 GMT

Hi (again):

> Dennis: If you want to search for an exact string you should use "grep -w 50".

Well, I would agree if/when you are using 'grep', but the tool choice was never stated. Hence, TMTOWTDI ;-)

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: matching exact string

Dennis Handly — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:38:57 GMT

>JRF: I would agree if/when you are using 'grep'

My comment was more pointed at the 3 times as many replies using grep.

Re: matching exact string

lawrenzo_1 — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 09:06:44 GMT

great stuff, pleanty of examples to mess with there.

Thanks again all!

Chris.