perl regex - pattern matching - perl

Can anyone explain what is being done below?
$name=~m,common/([^/]+)/run.*/([^/]+)/([^/]+)$,;

common, run and / are match themselves.
() captures.
[^/]+ matches 1 or more characters that aren't /.
.* matches 0 or more characters that aren't Line Feeds.[1]
$ is equivalent to (\n?\z).[2]
\n optionally matches a Line Feed.
\z matches the end of the string.
I think it's trying to match a path of one or both of the following forms:
.../common/XXX/runYYY/XXX/XXX
common/XXX/runYYY/XXX/XXX
Where
XXX is a sequence of at least one character that doesn't contain /.
YYY is a sequence of any number of characters (incl zero) that doesn't contain /.
It matches more than that, however.
It matches uncommon/XXX/runYYY/XXX/XXX
It matches common/XXX/runYYY/XXX/XXX/XXX/XXX/XXX/XXX
The parts in bold are captured (available to the caller).
When the s flag isn't used.
When the m flag isn't used.

Related

How to replace a character using sed with different lengths in preceding string

I have a file in which I want to replace the "_" string with "-" in cases where it makes up a part of my gene name. Examples of the gene names and my intended output are:
aa1c1_123 -> aa1c1-123
aa1c2_456 -> aa1c1-456
aa1c10_789 -> aa1c1-789
In essence, the first four characters are fixed, followed by 1 or 2 characters depending on the chromosome, an underscore and then the remainder of the gene ID which could vary in length and character. Important is that there are other strings in this gene information column contains other strings with underscores (e.g. "gene_id", "transcript_id", "five_prime_utr") so using sed -i.bak s/_/-/g' file.gtf
can't be done.
Perhaps not the most elegant way, but this should work:
sed -i.bak 's/\([0-9a-z]\{4\}[0-9][0-9]\?\)_/\1-/g' file.gtf
i.e. capture a group (referenced by \1 in the substitution) of 4 characters consisting of lower case letters and digits followed by exactly one digit and perhaps another digit, which is followed by an underscore; if found, replace it by the group's content and a dash. This should exclude your other occurrences consisting of only characters and an underscore.

Extracting substring from inside bracketed string, where the substring may have spaces

I've got an application that has no useful api implemented, and the only way to get certain information is to parse string output. This is proving to be very painful...
I'm trying to achieve this in bash on SLES12.
Given I have the following strings:
QMNAME(QMTKGW01) STATUS(Running)
QMNAME(QMTKGW01) STATUS(Ended normally)
I want to extract the STATUS value, ie "Ended normally" or "Running".
Note that the line structure can move around, so I can't count on the "STATUS" being the second field.
The closest I have managed to get so far is to extract a single word from inside STATUS like so
echo "QMNAME(QMTKGW01) STATUS(Running)" | sed "s/^.*STATUS(\(\S*\)).*/\1/"
This works for "Running" but not for "Ended normally"
I've tried switching the \S* for [\S\s]* in both "grep -o" and "sed" but it seems to corrupt the entire regex.
This is purely a regex issue, by doing \S you requested to match non-white space characters within (..) but the failing case has a space between which does not comply with the grammar defined. Make it simple by explicitly calling out the characters to match inside (..) as [a-zA-Z ]* i.e. zero or more upper & lower case characters and spaces.
sed 's/^.*STATUS(\([a-zA-Z ]*\)).*/\1/'
Or use character classes [:alnum:] if you want numbers too
sed 's/^.*STATUS(\([[:alnum:] ]*\)).*/\1/'
sed 's/.*STATUS(\([^)]*\)).*/\1/' file
Output:
Running
Ended normally
Extracting a substring matching a given pattern is a job for grep, not sed. We should use sed when we must edit the input string. (A lot of people use sed and even awk just to extract substrings, but that's wasteful in my opinion.)
So, here is a grep solution. We need to make some assumptions (in any solution) about your input - some are easy to relax, others are not. In your example the word STATUS is always capitalized, and it is immediately followed by the opening parenthesis (no space, no colon etc.). These assumptions can be relaxed easily. More importantly, and not easy to work around: there are no nested parentheses. You will want the longest substring of non-closing-parenthesis characters following the opening parenthesis, no mater what they are.
With these assumptions:
$ grep -oP '\bSTATUS\(\K[^)]*(?=\))' << EOF
> QMNAME(QMTKGW01) STATUS(Running)
> QMNAME(QMTKGW01) STATUS(Ended normally)
> EOF
Running
Ended normally
Explanation:
Command options: o to return only the matched substring; P to use Perl extensions (the \K marker and the lookahead). The regexp: we look for a word boundary (\b) - so the word STATUS is a complete word, not part of a longer word like SUBSTATUS; then the word STATUS and opening parenthesis. This is required for a match, but \K instructs that this part of the matched string will not be returned in the output. Then we seek zero or more non-closing-parenthesis characters ([^)]*) and we require that this be followed by a closing parenthesis - but the closing parenthesis is also not included in the returned string. That's a "lookahead" (the (?= ... ) construct).

Unable to use '*' to search/replace -- sed

I want to make all a.b.c.top*.gz mentions to new-word/new-table.
Something like -->
es.fr.en.top20.gz becomes binarised-model/phrase-table
I did this :
sed -i 's/es\.fr\.en\.top*\.gz/binarised-model\/phrase-table/g' top*/mert-work/moses.ini
I had initially not used backslash before periods, but, once it did not work, I thought maybe period is tricky.
But, it does not seem to replace anything. What's going wrong ?
Thanks !
Using * as a wildcard is correct for bash globbing, but not if you work with regex, which is the case when using sed. Instead of *, try .*.
In regex, * means match the preceding character any number of times. The wildcard character is ., so .* matches any number of any characters.
If you know that the character you want to match is always a number, it's safer to use [0-9]*. If you even know how many characters this number will have, then you can even use e.g. [0-9]\{2\} to match exactly two numerals.
Sed uses regular expressions, not shell globbing. That means that (1) . matches any single character except a newline, so you are right to escape them to match a literal dot, and (2) * matches zero or more of the token preceding it, here that's p. You need
sed -i 's/es\.fr\.en\.top.*\.gz/binarised-model\/phrase-table/g' top*/mert-work/moses.ini
# ˆ

meaning of the following regular expressions written in perl

Here is a piece of code
while($l=~/(\\\s*)$/) {
statements;
}
$l contains a line of text taken form file, in effect this code is for go through lines in file.
Questions:
I don't clearly understand what the condition in while is doing. I think it is trying to match group of \ followed by some number of white spaces at the end of line and loop should stop whenever a line ends with \ and may be some white spaces. I am not sure of it.
I came across statement $a ~= s/^(.*$)/$1/ . What I understand that ^ will force matching at the beginning of string, but in (.*$) would mean match all the characters at the end of string . Dose it mean that the statement is trying to find if any group of character at the end is same as group of character in the beginning of text ?
It is interesting to note that this statement:
while ( $l =~ /(\\\s*)$/ ) {
Is an infinite loop unless $l is altered inside the loop so that the regex no longer matches. As has already been mentioned by others, this is what it matches:
( ... ) a capture group, captures string to $1 (that's the number one, not lower case L)
\\ matches a literal backslash
\s* matches 0 or more whitespace characters.
$ matches end of line with optional newline.
Since you do not have the /g modifier, this regex will not iterate through matches, it will simply check if there is a match, resetting the regex each iteration, thereby causing an endless loop.
The statement
$a ~= s/^(.*$)/$1/
Looks rather pointless. It captures a string of characters up until end of string, then replaces it with itself. The captured text is stored in $1 and is simply replaced. The only marginally useful thing about this regex is that:
It matches up until newline \n, and nothing further, which may be of some use to a parser. A period . matches any character except newline, unless the /s modifier is present on the regex.
It captures the line in $1 for future use. However, a simple /^(.*$)/ would do the same.
1. the while
Usually while (regex) is used with the /g modifier, otherwise, if it matches, you get an infinite loop (unless you exit the loop, like using last).
statements would be executed continuously in an infinite loop.
In your case, adding the g
while($l=~/(\\\s*)$/g)
will have the while make only one loop, due to the $ - making a match unique (whatever matches up to the end of string is unique, as $ marks the end, and there is nothing after...).
2. $a ~= s/^(.*$)/$1/
This is a substitution. If the string ^.*$ matches (and it will, since ^.*$ matches (almost, see comment) anything) it is replaced with... $1 or what's inside the (), ie itself, since the match occurs from 1st char to the end of string
^ means beginning of string
(.*) means all chars
$ end of string
so that will replace $a with itself - probably not what you want.
it matches a literal backslash followed by 0 or more spaces followed by the end of the line.
it executes statements for all the lines in that text file that contain a \, followed by zero or more spaces ( \s* ), at the end of the line ($).
It matches lines that end with a backslash character, ignoring any trailing whitespace characters.
Ending a line with a backslash is used in some languages and data files to indicate that the line is being continued on the next line. So I suspect this is part of a parser that merges these continuation lines.
If you enter a regular expression at RegExr and hover your mouse over the pieces, it displays the meaning of each piece in a tooltip.
(\\\s*)$ this regex means --- a \ followed by zero or more number of white space characters which is followed by end of the line. Since you have your regex in (...), you can extract what you matched using $1, if you need.
http://rubular.com/r/dtHtEPh5DX
EDIT -- based on your update
$a ~= s/^(.$)/$1/ --- this is search and replace. So your regex matches a line which contains exactly one character (since you use . http://www.regular-expressions.info/dot.html), except a new-line character. Since you use (...), the character which matched the regex is extracted and stored in variable a
EDIT -- you changed your regex so here is the updated answer
$a ~= s/^(.*$)/$1/ -- same as above except now it matches zero or more characters (except new-line)

sed - remove specific subscript from string

please provide me a sed oneliner which provides this output:
sdc3 sdc2
for Input :
sdc3[1] sdc2[0]
I mean remove all subscript value from the string ..
sed 's/\[[^]]*\]//g'
reads: substitute any string with literal "[" followed by zero or more characters that aren't a "]", and then the closing "]", with an empty string.
You need the [^]] bit to prevent greedy matching treating "[1] sdc2[0]" as a single match in your sample string.
As for your comment:
sed 's#\([^[ ]*\)\[[^]]*\]#/dev/\1#g'
I switch the seperator from the usual '/' to '#', just to avoid escaping the /dev/ bit you asked for (I won't say "for clarity")
the \(...\) bit matches a subgroup, here sdc2 or whatever, so we can refer to it in the replacement
the subgroup uses a similar character class to the one we used discarding the index: [^[ ] means any character except an "[" (again, to avoid greedily matching the index) or a space (assuming your values are space-delimited as per your post)
the replacement is now the literal "/dev/" followed by the first (and only) subgroup match
the g flag at the end tells it to perform multiple matches per line, instead of stopping at the first one