Re: [chat] prob with regex

[Michael Lake <Mike.Lake@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Ah Zhasper solved my problem. Here is his solution (posted to me so I 
hope its ok to cc here).

> <quote who="Michael Lake">
>> I am having some minor prob with a regex - I think my first .* is 
>> gobbling up the remainder of the expression.
>> I have a text file like this:
>> PAVEY AUASF020388
>> PAVEY,A AUASF02389
>> PAVEY,A AUASF02390       <-- just a comma then A
>> PAVEY,A. AUASF02391      <-- this one has a full stop
>> and I am matching the string PAVEY followed by anything then ONE white 
>> space then a string starting with AUASF that I want to remember

Zhasper wrote....
> this is where you're going wrong..
> You don't want "anything then ONE white space", what you're actually 
> looking
> for is "anything that isn't white space, followed by ONE white space"
>> s/PAVEY.* \(AUASF.*\)/AUASF00899 \1/
> 
> This thinking error leads to an error in your regexp..
> what you really want is
> 
> s/PAVEY[^\ ]* \(AUASF.*\)/AUASF00899 \1/

Nearly there. I just had to remove the space after the first * i.e.
 > s/PAVEY[^\ ]*\(AUASF.*\)/AUASF00899 \1/

My prob was that:
>> My prob is that sed script above is not replacing the PAVEY.*
>> I gather I cant use two '.*'s

and Zhasper had it right.....
> Quite right. regexp is greedy. you tell it .*, it grabs the largest string
> it can find that can match .*

Thanks Zhasper and I'll checkout what that text2regex is Tony.

-- 
Mike Lake
Uni of Technol., Sydney



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