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hello all, I am having trouble with some regular expressions.
Here is a file format that I have:
What I need is a regular expression that just pulls out each section, so the first match would be everything from SECTION to SECTION.Code:SECTION Test
Comp 1
Comp 2
Frame 1
Frame 2
SECTION Test2
Comp 1
(..etc..)
I am terrible at regular expressions and I am not sure how to get this done. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.
what is the programing language you're coding in ??
A regex should be pretty universal, I am using Expresso as the designer tool.
Regex can actually be very different from one implementation to another. I wrote this up real quick using GNU sed. Which I believe has a syntax very similar to perl, your mileage may vary in other languages.
the contents the test file is:
And here is my round about way of doing it:Code:$~/temp> cat file
SECTION Test
Comp 1
Comp 2
Frame 1
Frame 2
SECTION Test2
Comp 1
Frame 1
Frame 2
To grab section Test2:Code:$~/temp> sed -n '/^SECTION\s\+Test/,/^SECTION\s\+Test/ s/\(.\+\s\+[0-9]\+\)/\1/p' file
Comp 1
Comp 2
Frame 1
Frame 2
There are probably other better ways, but that's what I came up with off the top of my head.Code:$~/temp> sed -n '/^SECTION\s\+Test2/,/^SECTION\s\+Test/ s/\(.\+\s\+[0-9]\+\)/\1/p' file
Comp 1
Frame 1
Frame 2
The gist of what I'm doing is this:
Match from ^SECTION\s\+Test to ^SECTION\s\+Test and then do a substitution for the pattern \(.\+\s\+[0-9]\+\) which gets stored in address space \1 (perl would call that $1), then print what is in \1, that way we get just the contents withing the matching section. The sed '-n' option tells it not to print anything unless we explicitly tell it to.
ah, great thanks ABS. I'll give that a shot.