CODEWITHSUNDEEP
awkgrepcut
user3614983
user3614983

Reputation: 21

How to grep from within specified character range in line and then print entire line

I have a file which have multiple row each row contains 3400 characters. I want to grep something from specified character range, let's say I want to grep "pavan" between character range 14 to 25 in the line.

To do this I can simply do like below

cat filename | cut -c 14-25 | grep pavan

I tried to use awk command but it does not work since the lines have more than `3000 characters but by this complete line will not print.

I want to print complete line also so that I can perform further operation on it.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 692

Answers (3)

glenn jackman
glenn jackman

Reputation: 246774

awk -v pattern="pavan" 'match( substr($0, 14, 11), pattern )' file

Will print the matching lines.

A more complicated way of doing the same thing:

awk -v patt="pavan" -v start=14 -v end=25 '
    match($0,patt) && start <= RSTART && RSTART <= end-RLENGTH
' file

-- stricken due to valid commentary from Ed Morton.

Upvotes: 1

Mark Setchell
Mark Setchell

Reputation: 207425

This is not very elegant, but does work!

Start off with what you had, but remove the unnecessary cat:

cut -c 14-25 file

now get awk to find the string you want and print the line number:

cut -c 14-25 file | awk '/paven/{print NR}'

Now you have a list of all the line numbers that you want. You can either process them in a while loop, like this:

cut -c 14-25 file | awk '/pavan/{print NR}' | while read line; do
   echo $line
   sed -n "${line} p"
done

or put them in an array

lines=($(cut -c 14-25 file | awk '/pavan/{print NR}'))
echo ${lines[@]}

Upvotes: 0

devnull
devnull

Reputation: 123458

Some bit of arithmetic and you could use grep:

grep -E '^.{13}.{0,7}pavan' filename

This would match lines containing pavan between the specified character range.

It essentially matches 13 arbitrary characters at the beginning of a line. Then looks for pavan that can be preceded by 0 to 7 arbitrary characters.

Upvotes: 0

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