CODEWITHSUNDEEP
grep
Laurent Mesguen
Laurent Mesguen

Reputation: 394

Find a string between two characters with grep

I have found on this answer the regex to find a string between two characters. In my case I want to find every pattern between ‘ and ’. Here's the regex :

(?<=‘)(.*?)(?=’)

Indeed, it works when I try it on https://regex101.com/.

The thing is I want to use it with grep but it doesn't work :

grep -E '(?<=‘)(.*?)(?=’)' file

Is there anything missing ?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1393

Answers (1)

riteshtch
riteshtch

Reputation: 8769

Those are positive look-ahead and look behind assertions. You need to enable it using PCRE(Perl Compatible Regex) and perhaps its better to get only matching part using -o option in GNU grep: 

grep -oP '(?<=‘)(.*?)(?=’)' file

Upvotes: 2

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