On Saturday, May 27, 2017 5:27:46 PM EDT bruce wrote: > Hi. > > I've got a file.. with a bunch of lines looking like: > > $bookVariable['asu']['Fall-2016']='link'; > $bookVariable['lehmancuny']['Fall-2016']='1'; > $bookVariable['uvu']['Fall-2016']='1'; > $bookVariable['wmich']['Summer II 2017']='1'; > $bookVariable['wmich']['Summer I 2017']='1'; > $bookVariable['dmacc']['Summer-2017']='1'; > $bookVariable['sdmesa']['Summer-2017']='link'; > > I''m looking to get the "text" inside the 1st group of brackets [] > > The following sed only gets the 1st 3 lines.. and it doesn't > completely work. > > sed -n "s/^.*bookVariable\['\(\S*\)'].*$/\1/p" foo.txt That's because the * quantifier is "greedy" and will match as much as it can before forcing a match on "'"[1]. The \(\S*\) isn't what you want. What you probably meant was \([^']*\) instead. That will match only the part up to the *first* closing single quote character. ____________________ [1] The matching will go all the way to the end of the line and then fail because there's no single quote there. The matching engine will start backtracking to the first point that it can get a match of "']". That will encompass what you are seeing instead of only the first thingy in the square brackets. Greedy matching. -- Garry T. Williams _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
