![]() ![]() In grep, a dot character will match any character except a return. 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. So, most characters match themselves, and even the special characters will match themselves if they are preceded by a backslash. ![]() BBEdit's grep syntax coloring helps make this clear. Note: When passing grep patterns to BBEdit via AppleScript, be aware that both the backslash and double-quote characters have special meaning to AppleScript. In order to pass these through correctly, you must escape them in your script. Thus, to pass \r for a carriage return to BBEdit, you must write \\r in your AppleScript string. These special characters, or metacharacters, are used to match certain types of other characters:Īny character except a line break (i.e. 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. It is important to note that ^ and $ do not actually match return characters.įor 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). 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. " will match the three characters 'f', 'o',and 'o'. ", you will match the same text, but the match will contain four characters: 'f', 'o', 'o', and a return. In softwrapped files, ^ and $ will also match after and before soft line breaks, respectively. ![]() You can combine ^ and $ within a pattern to force a match to constitute an entire line. Try it against these three lines to see for yourself: Will only match "foo" on a line by itself, with no other characters. Only at the beginning of the document (as opposed to ^, which matches at the bginning of the document and also at the beginning of each line)Īny word boundary, defined as any position between a \w character and a \W character, in either orderĪt the end of the document (as opposed to $, which matches at the end of the document, but also at the end of each line)Īt the end of the document, or before a trailing return at the end of the document, if there is oneĮxamples (the text matched by the pattern is underlined)Ĭharacter Classes Match Sets or Ranges of Characters The pattern will only match the second line. The character class construct lets you specify a set or a range of characters to match, or to ignore. A character class is constructed by placing a pair of square brackets around the group or range of characters you wish to include. To exclude, or ignore, all characters specified by a character class, add a caret character ^ just after the opening bracket. You can use any number of characters or ranges between the brackets. Here are some examples:Īny character that is neither a vowel nor a digitĬharacter classes respect the setting of the Case Sensitive checkbox in the Find dialog. Will only match "a" if Case Sensitive is off,Ī character class matches when the search encounters any one of the characters in the pattern. However, the contents of a set are only treated as separate characters, not as words.
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