Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi everyone,

I'm almost tearing my hairs to find a valid regexp which will match EVERY character in a string, including the question mark!

Specifically I need to match a string which contains the word (example) "stringtobematched" at the end of it.

Everyone would suggest this:

^(.*)stringtobematched$

This obviously works, but it stops working if I introduce the question mark (?) character at any point before the matching pattern.

For example:

blablabla?blastringtobematched

..will not be matched!

It looks like that the "." (dot) character doesn't match the question mark.

Is there a regexp which matches every characters question marks included? (not necessarily matching only strings with question marks, but optionally)

I've tried something like this:

(.*)[\?](.*)blastringtobematched?

But it didn't work

Any help?


Thanks!


PS: regexp being used from Apache's mod_rewrite. Writing in this forum because after all regexp's are still considered part of shell scripting. Apologies in case I was wrong!

Hello,

The first pattern would be matched by:

Code:

.*stringtobematched$

And also the questionmark:

Code:

$ echo 'blablabla?blastringtobematched'|grep '.*stringtobematched$'
blablabla?blastringtobematched

And this should specifically match a string with a question mark.

Code:

.*?.*blastringtobematched

E.g:

Code:

$ echo 'blablabla?blastringtobematched'|grep '.*?.*blastringtobematched'
blablabla?blastringtobematched

mod_rewrite doesn't seem to match it. I've also tried to escape it e.g. \? but still it doesn't get matched

Code:

^.*stringtobematched.*$

And what happens with this ?

Perhaps ? doesn not get interpreted as part of URL but as the start of the parameter string?