Bash =~ operator and tab characters

[Karl Auer]

On Sun, 2016-04-24 at 15:08 +0200, Johnny Rosenberg wrote:
> I need to check a lot of strings for the following:
> TAB ( <at least 4 and not more than 10 numbers or minuses> ) TAB

#!/bin/bash

while read LINE ; do
{
   if [[ $LINE =~ $'\t'[0-9\-]{4,10}$'\t' ]] ; then
      echo "$LINE"
   fi
}
done

Redirect or pipe your data into the above script and it will echo all
matching lines. Not well tested. Note that the regexp does not check
for formatted dates - just for exactly what you said :-)

Obviously you can do whatever else you want inside the if statement.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure the "$'\t'" construct is a bashism.

You can't match on tabs nicely in any shell I know of (not that I know
them all). For heavy duty text processing you are generally better off
with a language like perl or awk.

Regards, K.

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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
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