I'm confused about a couple things.
First, the grep not only will match "N15" which is invalid, and not
match "N15 4RC" which is valid, but it will not match "N15 4RCCCC"
which is invalid.
Second, what does the ".+" do? Removing that causes only a blank
line to be matched.
The grep pattern is seemingly stating: "if the first characters do
not match the following pattern, and, there are some characters,"
then the result of the grep pattern is True so highlight that line
or conduct the replace.
The grep pattern (with the negation) matches neither:
A valid post code followed a carriage return, does match the
pattern and is not followed by any non-space or non-tab characters.
A valid post code followed by other characters, does match the
pattern and is followed by non-space characters.
Just trying to understand the grep patterns.
Thanks,
Randy
On 26/11/2006, at 11:07 , Ronald J Kimball wrote:
On Sat, Nov 25, 2006 at 11:58:37PM +0000, Richard A Clarke wrote:
Given a grep pattern, how do I find exceptions in my file that
_don't_ fit
the pattern?
A valid postcode matches this pattern:
^([A-Z]{1,2}[\d]+ \d[A-Z][A-Z])$
I'd like to step through the file finding the next instance that
DOESN'T
match my pattern - how do I do that?
Here's one way to do it:
^(?![A-Z]{1,2}[\d]+ \d[A-Z][A-Z]).+$
Ronald
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