Re: quick scripting question - finding occurrence in many lines

[John O'Hagan <johnohagan@iprimus.com.au>]

On Thursday 09 November 2006 03:40, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 09, 2006 at 12:52:57AM +1100, John O'Hagan wrote:

[...]

> > ----------------
> > while read i ; do
> >
> > 	if [[ $(echo "$i" | grep \\-\$ ) ]]; then
> >
> > 		i=$( echo "$i" | sed s/-\$//)
> > 		echo "$i"
> > 	else echo "$i"' '
> > 	fi
> >
> > done < IN | tr -d '\n' | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -B1 'Processor' |
> > grep -v 'Processor\|--'
> > --------------------------------
> >
> > This removes hyphens at the end of lines or else adds a space, which
> > converts
>
> here's a simpler way to do that, I think ;)
>
> tr '\n' ' ' | sed 's/- //g' | tr ' ' '\n' | grep -B1 'Processor' | grep
> -v 'Processor\|--'
>
> replace the newlines with spaces. then use sed as it matches better
> than tr to strip occurences of '- '. The assumption here is that
> hypens don't appear at the end of words and they only occur because we
> created them with our tr '\n' ' '.

I was worried (well, that's a bit strong!) about words ending with hyphens, so 
I went with your sed approach:

#sed s/$/' '/g <IN  | sed s/'\- $'//g | tr -d '\n' | tr ' ' '\n' | 
grep -B1 'Processor' |  grep -v 'Processor\|--'

i.e. append a space to each line, remove any hyphen-plus-space combinations at 
the end of lines, then grep as usual.

My reasoning was that a human reader (who would have no problem with this 
task), sees a newline as a space and an end-of-line hyphen as not a space. 

> SO I wonder what happened to the OP? Is he just watching waiting for
> the right solution, or is he long gone?
>

[...]

OP? What OP? :)

Regards,

John