Hi rovf,
Good catch. Note, however, that your suggestion in post #11:

Code:

grep -E  '[^,]+,[ 0-9]+[.][0-9]{3}'

can also match a decimal point and three digits in the 3rd or subsequent fields. To avoid that possibility, you need to anchor your grep search pattern to the start of a line:

Code:

grep -E  '^[^,]+,[ 0-9]+[.][0-9]{3}'

And, if you go back to post #1 in this thread, you will notice that it appears that the OP only wants to print the first two fields of matched lines; not the entire line. It seems that that is why looney used the -o option and the leading .* in the search pattern. To restrict that match to the 2nd field and to print the entire contents of the 1st two fields if there are more digits or non-digit characters after a decimal point and 3 digits in the 2nd field, you might want something more like:

Code:

grep -Eo  '^[^,]*,[ 0-9]+[.][0-9]{3}[^,]*'

if the version of grep on your system supports the -o option (which is not required by the standards). (Note that I used [^,]* in both places in this suggestion rather than [^,]+ because there is no stated requirement that the 1st field be non-empty.) If your system's grep does not include a -o option, you'll have to use something like awk, perl, or sed instead of grep to print a partial line match.