Hi John
In your case it's the hyphen that's special, it is used as range indicator,
e.g. [a-z] means [abcdef...z], unless it's at the end of the bracket expression
To quote from the grep man page
"...to include a literal - place it last."
Although I've always been putting the "-" at the start, which is what you have
done in your second example.
Cheers,
f.
On 27/10/2022 15:02, John Levin via GLLUG wrote:
Dear list,
In cleaning up mountains of OCR'd text, I've found Grep doing something I don't
undesrtand.
The aim is to locate lines ending with certain punctuation marks(-—.) and spaces. But depending on the order of those punctuation marks, I get different results. With the full stop listed first, I get
two results, one of which doesn't fit the criteria; with the stop third I get 5 lines correctly matching the criteria (and I presume, all the lines that do match).
johnl@Hasek:~/github/statutes$ grep ' [.-— ]\{3,\}$' W*/mon*.txt
and every of them are and is hereby obliged to accept, re- ...
1. s. </.~|
johnl@Hasek:~/github/statutes$ grep ' [-—. ]\{3,\}$' W*/mon*.txt
and every of them are and is hereby obliged to accept, re- ...
'fliqitors autj licences, — Aorb’s -----
IPfipficians, -----
II — -- — -.... - -- - - - —
shall be ~ - - —
Is there something about the order of characters in regex square brackets? Does
the stop have a special meaning when given first?
Thanks in advance,
John
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