Help with awk regular expression for RS record separator Post: 303001605

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Help with awk regular expression for RS record separator Post 303001605 by Don Cragun on Tuesday 8th of August 2017 02:27:45 AM

08-08-2017

Registered User

It's not just Mr.. It's also Mrs., Ms., Dr., Sr., Jr., and hundreds of other abbreviations. And these abbreviations don't always appear at the start of a sentence. (Or maybe you thought that the caret in (^Mr. | [?!]) means "not". It doesn't; it anchors that part of the ERE to the start of a string. And the <space> before the bracket expression is a literal <space> that must be matched exactly (and that <space> would never appear before a sentence terminating character in English text).

If your sentences all end at the end of a line, anchoring (i.e. [.!?]$ as I suggested in post #6 in this thread) should work for you. If you have multiple sentences that take multiple lines or multiple sentences on a line AND sentences that do not end at the end of a line have a sentence terminating character immediately followed by two <space> characters, then the RS value I suggested i post #6 (i.e.

Code:

RS="[.?!](  |$)"

with exactly two spaces before the vertical bar in that ERE) should give you records that are sentences (without the character that terminates the sentence).

But if you have abbreviations followed by a single space and sentence terminating characters followed by a single space (not a double space) and not appearing at the end of a line, you are going to find it very difficult to guess which periods terminate abbreviations and which periods terminate sentences. (Note that it is also possible for an abbrevition to appear at the end of a sentence.

And, semicolons and colons do not end English sentences. I don't understand why you're including them in your EREs.

Last edited by Don Cragun; 08-08-2017 at 03:53 PM.. Reason: Fix typo: s/[.!?]?/[.!?]$/

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LEARN ABOUT ULTRIX

style

style(1)						      General Commands Manual							  style(1)

Name
       style - analyze surface characteristics of a document

Syntax
       style [-ml] [-mm] [-a] [-e] [-l num] [-r num] [-p] [-P] file...

Description
       The command analyzes the surface characteristics of the writing style of a document.  It reports on readability, sentence length and struc-
       ture, word length and usage, verb type, and sentence openers.  Because runs before looking at the text, formatting header files	should	be
       included  as  part  of  the  input.  The default macro package -ms may be overridden with the flag -mm.	The flag -ml, which causes to skip
       lists, should be used if the document contains many lists of non-sentences.  The other options are used to locate  sentences  with  certain
       characteristics.

Options
       -a Displays all sentences with their length and readability index.

       -e Displays all sentences that begin with an expletive.

       -l num
	  Displays all sentences longer than num.

       -ml
	  Skips lists in document.

       -mm
	  Overrides the default macro package -ms.

       -P Displays parts of speech of the words in the document.

       -p Displays all sentences that contain a passive verb.

       -r num
	  Displays all sentences whose readability index is greater than num.

Restrictions
       Use of non-standard formatting macros may cause incorrect sentence breaks.

See Also
       deroff(1), diction(1)

																	  style(1)