Using awk
, I need to find a word in a file that matches a regex pattern.
I only want to print the word matched with the pattern.
So if
gawk can get the matching part of every line using this as action:
{ if (match($0,/your regexp/,m)) print m[0] }
match(string, regexp [, array]) If array is present, it is cleared, and then the zeroth element of array is set to the entire portion of string matched by regexp. If regexp contains parentheses, the integer-indexed elements of array are set to contain the portion of string matching the corresponding parenthesized subexpression. http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html#String-Functions
If Perl is an option, you can try this:
perl -lne 'print $1 if /(regex)/' file
To implement case-insensitive matching, add the i
modifier
perl -lne 'print $1 if /(regex)/i' file
To print everything AFTER the match:
perl -lne 'if ($found){print} else{if (/regex(.*)/){print $1; $found++}}' textfile
To print the match and everything after the match:
perl -lne 'if ($found){print} else{if (/(regex.*)/){print $1; $found++}}' textfile
If you are only interested in the last line of input and you expect to find only one match (for example a part of the summary line of a shell command), you can also try this very compact code, adopted from How to print regexp matches using `awk`?:
$ echo "xxx yyy zzz" | awk '{match($0,"yyy",a)}END{print a[0]}'
yyy
Or the more complex version with a partial result:
$ echo "xxx=a yyy=b zzz=c" | awk '{match($0,"yyy=([^ ]+)",a)}END{print a[1]}'
b
Warning: the awk
match()
function with three arguments only exists in gawk
, not in mawk
Here is another nice solution using a lookbehind regex in grep
instead of awk
. This solution has lower requirements to your installation:
$ echo "xxx=a yyy=b zzz=c" | grep -Po '(?<=yyy=)[^ ]+'
b
It sounds like you are trying to emulate GNU's grep -o
behaviour. This will do that providing you only want the first match on each line:
awk 'match($0, /regex/) {
print substr($0, RSTART, RLENGTH)
}
' file
Here's an example, using GNU's awk
implementation (gawk):
awk 'match($0, /a.t/) {
print substr($0, RSTART, RLENGTH)
}
' /usr/share/dict/words | head
act
act
act
act
aft
ant
apt
art
art
art
Read about match, substr, RSTART and RLENGTH in the awk
manual.
After that you may wish to extend this to deal with multiple matches on the same line.
This is the very basic
awk '/pattern/{ print $0 }' file
ask awk
to search for pattern
using //
, then print out the line, which by default is called a record, denoted by $0. At least read up the documentation.
If you only want to get print out the matched word.
awk '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){ if($i=="yyy"){print $i} } }' file
Using sed can also be elegant in this situation. Example (replace line with matched group "yyy" from line):
$ cat testfile
xxx yyy zzz
yyy xxx zzz
$ cat testfile | sed -r 's#^.*(yyy).*$#\1#g'
yyy
yyy
Relevant manual page: https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/sed.html#Back_002dreferences-and-Subexpressions