Help with a regular expression???
Ray Parrish
crp at cmc.net
Wed Jan 27 19:07:02 UTC 2010
James Michael Fultz wrote:
> * James Michael Fultz <croooow at gmail.com> [2010-01-27 13:04 -0500]:
>
>> * Ray Parrish <crp at cmc.net> [2010-01-27 09:04 -0800]:
>>
>>> Amedee Van Gasse (ub) wrote:
>>>
>> [...]
>>
>>>> The same regex syntax can be used with the bash command sed:
>>>>
>>>> sed 's/ ([^ ])/_ \1/g'
>>>>
>> [...]
>>
>>> DescriptionSection=`echo | sed 's/ ([^ ])/_ \1/g'`
>>> echo "$DescriptionSection"
>>>
>>> And I get the following cryptic error, which tells me nothing. Can you help?
>>>
>>> sed: -e expression #1, char 19: invalid reference \1 on `s' command's RHS
>>>
>> DescriptionSection=`echo | sed 's/ \([^ ]\)/_ \1/g'`
>>
> [...]
>
> Oops! Overlooked one other thing.
>
> DescriptionSection=`echo "$SomeVar" | sed 's/ \([^ ]\)/_ \1/g'`
>
> Where '$SomeVar' is a variable whose contents you wish to process.
> Also, the following form using printf is actually safer.
>
> DescriptionSection=`printf '%s\n' "$SomeVar" | sed 's/ \([^ ]\)/_ \1/g'`
>
> The reason printf is safer than echo being that printf ignores
> subsequent options (strings starting with a dash), whereas echo may
> misinterpret an arbitrary string beginning with a dash as an option.
>
Hello again,
That has gotten it perfectly now. Thank you! I have the following code -
DescriptionSection=" - Multidimensional Array Objects
* Efficient arrays of homogeneous machine types (floats, longs,
complex doubles)
* Arbitrary number of dimensions
line continuation.
* Sophisticated structural operations
- Universal Function Objects
* Support mathematical functions on all Python objects
- Very efficient for array objects"
DescriptionSection=`echo "$DescriptionSection" | sed 's/ \([^
\*-]\)/_ \1/g'`
DescriptionSection=`echo "$DescriptionSection" | sed 's/ \([^
\*-]\)/_ \1/g'`
echo "$DescriptionSection"
Which outputs -
- Multidimensional Array Objects
* Efficient arrays of homogeneous machine types (floats, longs,
_ complex doubles)
* Arbitrary number of dimensions
_ line continuation.
* Sophisticated structural operations
- Universal Function Objects
* Support mathematical functions on all Python objects
- Very efficient for array objects
Now I can finally run my other code over the DescriptionSection variable
to format it's text lists into HTML lists.
Later, Ray Parrish
--
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