John H. Robinson, IV wrote: > Ralph Shumaker wrote: >> I've been compiling my script, using sed to do everything I was >> previously doing in vim. However, I've hit a snag. One thing that works >> in vim does *not* in sed. >> >> vim would strip out all unwanted line feeds with: >> ":%s/\([ a-zA-Z0-9,\.:;?!)?-]\)\n\([A-Z^a-z(]\)/\1 \2/cg" >> >> In my script, >> "sed -e 's/\([ a-zA-Z0-9,\.:;?!)?-]\)\n\([A-Z^a-z(]\)/\1 \2/g' 0035 >0036" >> doesn't change anything, so (as a test) I reduced it down to match one >> line in particular: >> "sed -e 's/e\nu/e u/g' 0035" >> and still no go. But reducing it to: >> "sed -e 's/e$/eeeeeee/g' 0035" >> or >> "sed -e 's/^u/uuuuuuu/g' 0035" >> works (except that it does nothing to the newline). >> >> Any suggestions? > > Almost sounds like a job for perl. I will have to go back to the > original problem to see if a nice, clean perl one-liner can tend to > this. >
I'm sure jhriv will come up w/ a one-liner for you, but I just wanted to remark that your use of \. within character class brackets is not required. If vim requires it, then it's vim that's broke. The usual language is that '.' has no special meaning within brackets. It's useful to dwell on this a bit -- spending a few minutes here makes regular expressions a little less intimidating. Normally the dot character stands for _any character_ so you can see that it wouldn't make much sense to define a character class list that contains such a wild card. If '.' means anything, then any other content is superfluous! For further thought, the only specials within brackets ought to be '-' (for ranges) and ']' (the end-delimiter for the character class). Then you kinda have to add '\' to the specials so that you can write '\]' to mean a literal ']'. You can also use '\-' and, of course '\\'. By convention, putting the '-' as the first or last character in the brackets also means a literal '-'. I suppose putting ']' as the first character might logically also mean a literal ']' (since otherwise you have an empty class -- maybe it actually works that way?. Arguably, using '\-', '\]' is better than remembering additional conventions, but I mention it so that you will recognize them when you see them. Regards, ..jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
