GNU bug report logs - #49698
Search for URL containing certain word

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Package: grep;

Reported by: Julius Hamilton <julkhami <at> gmail.com>

Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2021 19:41:01 UTC

Severity: normal

Done: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>

Bug is archived. No further changes may be made.

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Report forwarded to bug-grep <at> gnu.org:
bug#49698; Package grep. (Thu, 22 Jul 2021 19:41:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.

Acknowledgement sent to Julius Hamilton <julkhami <at> gmail.com>:
New bug report received and forwarded. Copy sent to bug-grep <at> gnu.org. (Thu, 22 Jul 2021 19:41:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.

Message #5 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Julius Hamilton <julkhami <at> gmail.com>
To: bug-grep <at> gnu.org
Subject: Search for URL containing certain word
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2021 21:08:32 +0200
[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]
Hey,

I'm new to grep so I'd love any tips on how to search for text in the
following way.

I'd like to find a certain URL that is somewhere in a large text file. I
would like to find it by specifying "a URL which contains word X somewhere
within it", or even "a URL which is located within 3 lines of the word X".

I'd like to copy that URL and then write it to the top of the file.

I am considering doing this with Vim search commands, yet the underlying
regex would be the same, so I think this would be a good place to ask.

How would you do this with grep? Or a similar tool?

Thanks very much,
Julius
[Message part 2 (text/html, inline)]

Information forwarded to bug-grep <at> gnu.org:
bug#49698; Package grep. (Thu, 22 Jul 2021 23:49:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.

Message #8 received at 49698 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Seth David Schoen <schoen <at> loyalty.org>
To: Julius Hamilton <julkhami <at> gmail.com>
Cc: 49698 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#49698: Search for URL containing certain word
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2021 16:29:31 -0700
Julius Hamilton writes:

> Hey,
> 
> I'm new to grep so I'd love any tips on how to search for text in the
> following way.
> 
> I'd like to find a certain URL that is somewhere in a large text file. I
> would like to find it by specifying "a URL which contains word X somewhere
> within it", or even "a URL which is located within 3 lines of the word X".
> 
> I'd like to copy that URL and then write it to the top of the file.
> 
> I am considering doing this with Vim search commands, yet the underlying
> regex would be the same, so I think this would be a good place to ask.
> 
> How would you do this with grep? Or a similar tool?

Hi Julius,

I'm not sure this is quite what the grep bug interface is intended for. :-)

egrep -C 3 X largefile | egrep -o "$URL_REGEX"

where URL_REGEX is a regular expression matching URLs with any
particular level of specificity that you want, with a very simple case
being something like

    https?://[^, ]+

As we might have recently discussed on help-bash (?), Unix doesn't have
a super-nice built-in notion of "writing to the top of a file" and you
would normally need to write the matches, followed by the original file,
to a temporary file.  Something like

set -e
temp=$(mktemp)
egrep -C 3 X largefile | egrep -o "$URL_REGEX" > $temp
cat largefile >> $temp
mv $temp largefile




Reply sent to Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>:
You have taken responsibility. (Fri, 23 Jul 2021 15:25:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.

Notification sent to Julius Hamilton <julkhami <at> gmail.com>:
bug acknowledged by developer. (Fri, 23 Jul 2021 15:25:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.

Message #13 received at 49698-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Julius Hamilton <julkhami <at> gmail.com>
Cc: 49698-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#49698: Search for URL containing certain word
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2021 08:24:04 -0700
Not a bug, so closing the bug report.




bug archived. Request was from Debbugs Internal Request <help-debbugs <at> gnu.org> to internal_control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sat, 21 Aug 2021 11:24:08 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.

This bug report was last modified 2 years and 220 days ago.

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