The pattern will only match the second line. Try it against these three lines to see for yourself: Will only match "foo" on a line by itself, with no other characters. You can combine ^ and $ within a pattern to force a match to constitute an entire line. In softwrapped files, ^ and $ will also match after and before soft line breaks, respectively. ", you will match the same text, but the match will contain four characters: 'f', 'o', 'o', and a return. " will match the three characters 'f', 'o',and 'o'. So, if you are looking for "foo" at the end of a line, the pattern " They match zero-width positions after and before returns, respectively. It is important to note that ^ and $ do not actually match return characters. For example, if you wanted to find every instance of a message sent by Patrick, from a log file which contains various other information like so:įrom: Rich, server: To: BBEdit-Talk, server: From: Patrick, server: Īnd you will find every occurrence of these lines in your file (or set of files if you do a multi-file search instead). a carriage return)īeginning of a line (unless used in a character class)Įnd of line (unless used in a character class)īeing able to specifically match text starting at the beginning or end of a line is an especially handy feature of grep. These special characters, or metacharacters, are used to match certain types of other characters:Īny character except a line break (i.e. Thus, to pass \r for a carriage return to BBEdit, you must write \\r in your AppleScript string. In order to pass these through correctly, you must escape them in your script. Note: When passing grep patterns to BBEdit via AppleScript, be aware that both the backslash and double-quote characters have special meaning to AppleScript. BBEdit's grep syntax coloring helps make this clear. So, most characters match themselves, and even the special characters will match themselves if they are preceded by a backslash. But what if you only want to match a literal dot? If you escape the dot: "\.", it will only match another literal dot character in your text. In grep, a dot character will match any character except a return.
To search for a backslash character itself, double it \\ so that its first appearance will escape the second.įor example, perhaps the most common "special character" in grep is the dot: ".". In this case, you must use the backslash character \ before that special character to have it be treated literally this is known as "escaping" the special character. However, sometimes you will need to include an exact, or literal, instance of these characters in your grep pattern. (The use of these characters is covered in the following sections.)
In addition to the simple character matching discussed above, there are various special characters that have different meanings when used in a grep pattern than in a normal search. Very simple patterns, to be sure, but patterns nonetheless. This idea is so obvious that it seems not worth mentioning, but the important thing to remember is that these characters are search patterns. For instance, if you are looking for the letter "t", Grep stops and reports a match when it encounters a "t" in the text. Most characters that you type into the Find dialog box match themselves.
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