Regular Expressions
Intro
Basic Usage
If you wanted to search through a long file looking for email addresses you might do something like
That looks like someone's mashed their face on the keyboard so lets break it down into separate components to make it easier to understand.
[a-z] matches anything inside the square brackets exactly once (in this case, it's looking for any lowercase letter)
+ this means the preceding element gets matched one or more times (so multiple letters)
@ matches the character found in the middle of an email address
[a-z]+ same again, a sequence of one or more lowercase characters
\. this tells it to use the actual . character instead of using it as a metacharacter
(com|org) the brackets get interpreted as a subexpression. in this case 'com' or 'org
This is obviously just an example to show you some features of regex. An RFC 822 compliant regex is unreadable. In practice I'd probably just do \w+@\w+.\w (word@word.word)
BRE vs ERE
This tutorial assumes you're using ERE (Extended Regular Expressions). Basic, or BRE, is just the same but you have to backslash brackets and you can't use ?,+ or |. That's also why we used grep -E instead of grep -e
List of Metacharacters
Metacharacter | Description |
| Matches any single character (whether this includes newlines sometimes depends on the application) |
| A bracket expression. Matches a single character that is contained within the brackets. For example, [abc] matches “a”, “b”, or “c”. [a-z] specifies a range which matches any lowercase letter from “a” to “z”. |
| Matches a single character that is not contained within the brackets. For example, |
| Matches the starting position within the string. In line-based tools, it matches the starting position of any line. |
| Matches the ending position of the string or the position just before a string-ending newline. In line-based tools, it matches the ending position of any line. |
| Defines a marked subexpression. The string that gets matched in the parentheses can be recalled later but that's a bit more advanced. |
| The choice (also known as alternation or set union) operator matches either the expression before or the expression after the operator. For example, |
| Matches the preceding element zero or more times. For example, |
| Matches the preceding element zero or one time. For example, ab?c matches only “ac” or “abc”. |
| Matches the preceding element one or more times. For example, ab+c matches “abc”, “abbc”, “abbbc”, and so on, but not “ac”. |
| Matches the preceding element at least |
More Examples
.at matches any three-character string ending with “at”, including “hat”, “cat”, and “bat”.
[hc]at matches “hat” and “cat”.
[^b]at matches all strings matched by .at except “bat”.
[^hc]at matches all strings matched by .at other than “hat” and “cat”.
^[hc]at matches “hat” and “cat”, but only at the beginning of the string or line.
[hc]at$ matches “hat” and “cat”, but only at the end of the string or line.
\[.\] matches any single character surrounded by “[” and “]” since the brackets are escaped, for example: “[a]” and “[b]”.
s.* matches s followed by zero or more characters, for example: “s” and “saw” and “seed”.
[hc]+at matches “hat”, “cat”, “hhat”, “chat”, “hcat”, “cchchat”, and so on, but not “at”.
[hc]?at matches “hat”, “cat”, and “at”.
[hc]*at matches “hat”, “cat”, “hhat”, “chat”, “hcat”, “cchchat”, “at”, and so on.
cat|dog matches “cat” or “dog”.
Further Reading
Regexlib - if you don't want to reinvent the wheel
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