How can I search for a multiline pattern in a file?

Question

I needed to find all the files that contained a specific string pattern. The first solution that comes to mind is using find piped with xargs grep:

Answer 1

Why don't you go for awk:

awk '/Start pattern/,/End pattern/' filename

Answer 2

Here is a more useful example:

pcregrep -Mi "<title>(.*\n){0,5}</title>" afile.html

It searches the title tag in a html file even if it spans up to 5 lines.

Here is an example of unlimited lines:

pcregrep -Mi "(?s)<title>.*</title>" example.html 

Answer 3

With silver searcher:

ag 'abc.*(\n|.)*efg'

Speed optimizations of silver searcher could possibly shine here.

Answer 4

You can use the grep alternative sift here (disclaimer: I am the author).

It support multiline matching and limiting the search to specific file types out of the box:

sift -m --files '*.py' 'YOUR_PATTERN'

(search all *.py files for the specified multiline regex pattern)

It is available for all major operating systems. Take a look at the samples page to see how it can be used to to extract multiline values from an XML file.

Answer 5

perl -ne 'print if (/begin pattern/../end pattern/)' filename

Answer 6

Here is the example using GNU grep:

grep -Pzo '_name.*\n.*_description'

-z/--null-data Treat input and output data as sequences of lines.

See also here