grep and regex

[helphope]

Hi evrybody.

Hope this is the right forum to post.

I'm trying to write down a grep string to find words which are near each other (not netx to each other) with few words among them. I found a regex but it doesn't work

grep -E '\bword1\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,80}word2\b' input.txt>output.txt

:confused: :confused:

Please, if someone has any hint, I would appreciate it a lot. Thanks

[ghostdog74]

you might want to post an example of an input string and the expected output you want.

[Arndt]

Hi evrybody.

Hope this is the right forum to post.

I'm trying to write down a grep string to find words which are near each other (not netx to each other) with few words among them. I found a regex but it doesn't work

grep -E '\bword1\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,80}word2\b' input.txt>output.txt

:confused: :confused:

Please, if someone has any hint, I would appreciate it a lot. Thanks

I don't remember what (?:) means in Perl regexps, but apparently "grep -E" doesn't support them. Does the command below work?


grep -E '\bword1\W+(\w+\W+){1,80}word2\b' input.txt>output.txt

[helphope]

Thanks for replying

you might want to post an example of an input string and the expected output you want.

OK. Let's take Othello's end to see what I'm looking for


Ah balmy breath, that dost almost persuade
Justice to break her sword! One more, one more.
Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee,
And love thee after. One more, and this the last:
So sweet was ne'er so fatal. I must weep,
But they are cruel tears: this sorrow's heavenly;
It strikes where it doth love. She wakes.

Now let's say that I'd like to find a paragraph with the words "persuade" and "dead"; these two words cannot be separated by more than 20 words. The outpt will be the quote I wrote up here (I mean all the paragraph, not just the sentence).

I got this
grep 'persuade.*dead' shakspeare.txt>output.txt :-k
but there is no limit for the words in bewteen the ones I specified.
I hope I made myself clear.

Thanks again