On 04/09/2021, Marc Chantreux <m...@unistra.fr> wrote: > hello, > >> :!sed s/abc/abc\n/g % | grep -c abc > > Note: in sed, "what i just matched" is noted &
Oh, that's good, thank you. *Shoulda seenit on the man page -- butta dinnt.* >From sed(1): > An ampersand (‘&’) appearing in the replacement is replaced by the string > matching the regular expression. >> Googled information suggests that the opposite of what's described in >> the man page may be true: You CAN use a literal newline, but you >> can't use \n. > > BSD sed is more litteral AFAIK so you need to escape a real 0x10 but > both GNU and BSD support escaped newlines: > > sed 's/abc/&\ > /g' So is this incorrect? <https://man.openbsd.org/sed#SED_REGULAR_EXPRESSIONS>: > The escape sequence \n matches a newline character embedded in the pattern > space. You can't, however, use a literal newline character in an address or > in the substitute command. > This doesn't help in vi so you can fake it for a moment using tr: > > sed 's/abc/&œ/g' | tr œ '\n' Like I mentioned elsewhere, I'm *really* not a fan of the "let's assume the input won't contain THIS" approach, and like I also mentioned in another mail, I would prolly write a script absent superior alternatives, so yeah, I agree: > Another solution is to write commands for this kind of tasks: > > <<\. cat > ~/x > #! /bin/ksh > > sed -r 's/a/&\ > /g' > . Wait, hold up, I'm not familiar with this input redirection idiom. Could you explain? Why the double <, and why does it not work with a single <? Also, could you explain the escaped period?[0] This is very hard to google. > then from vi, :w !~/x While we're at this, we should probably try and complete the script (which also needs the chmod +x treatment), so this will make more sense to all. Like so: #!/bin/sh sed -E 's/'$1'/&\ /g' | grep -c $1 Then, from the shell: $ <FILE count abc Or from inside (n)vi: (I named my script count and put it in ~/bin/, which is in my PATH.) :!<% count abc Or ":w !<% count abc", which is arguably better and just a tiny bit longer. But there's no shame in ":!cat % | count abc" or ":!cat FILE | count abc" either. The best invocation is the one you remember. *Now KISS.* An idea might be to use $@ instead of $1 in the script, but I haven't really thought through the implications, and I'm not sure how to reliably quote that after grep -c. If anyone wants to opine on that, shoot; but I'll prolly leave this for now. $1 feels safer and more KISS-compliant as well. >> literal carriage return, not a literal newline (^J). That's the case >> on Linux as well, and I don't know why. > > neither do i. > >> Your new subject line is slightly imprecise, as words are usually >> whitespace-delimited, and I was "looking for a way to count >> occurrences of >> 'abc' in FILE". Not every substring is a word. > > right ... wasn't thinking that much to the name. sorry :) Not to worry, and thank you so much! Ian > regards > marc > fn: [0] as the actress said to the ST ven... never mind
