excluding a character Post: 46337

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting excluding a character Post 46337 by kduffin on Tuesday 13th of January 2004 09:37:43 PM

01-13-2004

Registered User

Much of the real power behind many of the tools in UNIX comes from an understanding of "regular expressions".

A coulple of nice sites to visit and learn from:

http://www.regular-expressions.info/
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

A little history (from wikipedia):

A regular expression (abbreviated as regexp or regex) is a string that describes a whole set of strings, according to certain syntax rules. These expressions are used by many text editors and utilities (especially in the Unix operating system) to search bodies of text for certain patterns and, for example, replace the found strings with a certain other string.

The origin of regular expressions lies in automata theory and formal language theory (both part of theoretical computer science). These fields study models of computation (automata) and ways to describe and classify formal languages. A formal language is nothing but a set of strings. In the 1940s, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts described the nervous system by modelling neurons as small simple automata. The mathematician, Stephen Kleene, later described these models using his mathematical notation called regular sets. Ken Thompson built this notation into the editor qed, then into the Unix editor ed and eventually into grep. Ever since that time, regular expressions have been widely used in Unix and Unix-like utilities such as: expr, awk, Emacs, vim, lex, and Perl. Most tools use an implementation of the regex library built by Henry Spencer.

Cheers,

Keith

kduffin

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LEARN ABOUT ULTRIX

re_exec

regex(3)						     Library Functions Manual							  regex(3)

Name
       re_comp, re_exec - regular expression handler

Syntax
       char *re_comp(s)
       char *s;

       re_exec(s)
       char *s;

Description
       The  subroutine	compiles  a string into an internal form suitable for pattern matching.  The subroutine checks the argument string against
       the last string passed to

       The subroutine returns 0 if the string s was compiled successfully; otherwise a string containing an  error  message  is  returned.  If	is
       passed 0 or a null string, it returns without changing the currently compiled regular expression.

       The  subroutine returns 1 if the string s matches the last compiled regular expression, 0 if the string s failed to match the last compiled
       regular expression, and -1 if the compiled regular expression was invalid (indicating an internal error).

       The strings passed to both and may have trailing or embedded newline characters; they are terminated by	nulls.	 The  regular  expressions
       recognized are described in the manual entry for given the above difference.

Diagnostics
       The subroutine returns -1 for an internal error.

       The subroutine returns one of the following strings if an error occurs:

       No previous regular expression
       Regular expression too long
       unmatched (
       missing ]
       too many () pairs
       unmatched )

See Also
       ed(1), ex(1), egrep(1), fgrep(1), grep(1)

																	  regex(3)

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