AWK is a domain-specific language designed for text processing and typically used as a data extraction and reporting tool. Like sed and grep, it is a filter, and it is a standard feature of most Unix-like operating systems.
A regular expression, sometimes referred to as rational expression, is a sequence of characters that specifies a match pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or "find and replace" operations on strings, or for input validation. Regular expression techniques are developed in theoretical computer science and formal language theory.
sed is a Unix utility that parses and transforms text, using a simple, compact programming language. It was developed from 1973 to 1974 by Lee E. McMahon of Bell Labs, and is available today for most operating systems. sed was based on the scripting features of the interactive editor ed and the earlier qed. It was one of the earliest tools to support regular expressions, and remains in use for text processing, most notably with the substitution command. Popular alternative tools for plaintext string manipulation and "stream editing" include AWK and Perl.
A metacharacter is a character that has a special meaning to a computer program, such as a shell interpreter or a regular expression (regex) engine.
The backslash\ is a mark used mainly in computing and mathematics. It is the mirror image of the common slash /. It is a relatively recent mark, first documented in the 1930s. It is sometimes called a hack, whack, escape, reverse slash, slosh, downwhack, backslant, backwhack, bash, reverse slant, reverse solidus, and reversed virgule.
A string literal or anonymous string is a literal for a string value in the source code of a computer program. Modern programming languages commonly use a quoted sequence of characters, formally "bracketed delimiters", as in x = "foo", where, "foo" is a string literal with value foo. Methods such as escape sequences can be used to avoid the problem of delimiter collision and allow the delimiters to be embedded in a string. There are many alternate notations for specifying string literals especially in complicated cases. The exact notation depends on the programming language in question. Nevertheless, there are general guidelines that most modern programming languages follow.
A text file is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system.
A newline is a control character or sequence of control characters in character encoding specifications such as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc. This character, or a sequence of characters, is used to signify the end of a line of text and the start of a new one.
A path is a string of characters used to uniquely identify a location in a directory structure. It is composed by following the directory tree hierarchy in which components, separated by a delimiting character, represent each directory. The delimiting character is most commonly the slash ("/"), the backslash character ("\"), or colon (":"), though some operating systems may use a different delimiter. Paths are used extensively in computer science to represent the directory/file relationships common in modern operating systems and are essential in the construction of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). Resources can be represented by either absolute or relative paths.
In computer programming, glob patterns specify sets of filenames with wildcard characters. For example, the Unix Bash shell command mv *.txttextfiles/ moves all files with names ending in .txt from the current directory to the directory textfiles. Here, * is a wildcard and *.txt is a glob pattern. The wildcard * stands for "any string of any length including empty, but excluding the path separator characters ".
wildmat is a pattern matching library developed by Rich Salz. Based on the wildcard syntax already used in the Bourne shell, wildmat provides a uniform mechanism for matching patterns across applications with simpler syntax than that typically offered by regular expressions. Patterns are implicitly anchored at the beginning and end of each string when testing for a match.
.properties is a file extension for files mainly used in Java-related technologies to store the configurable parameters of an application. They can also be used for storing strings for Internationalization and localization; these are known as Property Resource Bundles.
In computer programming, leaning toothpick syndrome (LTS) is the situation in which a quoted expression becomes unreadable because it contains a large number of escape characters, usually backslashes ("\"), to avoid delimiter collision.
Raku rules are the regular expression, string matching and general-purpose parsing facility of the Raku programming language, and are a core part of the language. Since Perl's pattern-matching constructs have exceeded the capabilities of formal regular expressions for some time, Raku documentation refers to them exclusively as regexes, distancing the term from the formal definition.
This is a comparison of regular expression engines.
The structure of the Perl programming language encompasses both the syntactical rules of the language and the general ways in which programs are organized. Perl's design philosophy is expressed in the commonly cited motto "there's more than one way to do it". As a multi-paradigm, dynamically typed language, Perl allows a great degree of flexibility in program design. Perl also encourages modularization; this has been attributed to the component-based design structure of its Unix roots, and is responsible for the size of the CPAN archive, a community-maintained repository of more than 100,000 modules.
In the C programming language, an escape sequence is specially delimited text in a character or string literal that represents one or more other characters to the compiler. It allows a programmer to specify characters that are otherwise difficult or impossible to specify in a literal.
The C programming language has a set of functions implementing operations on strings in its standard library. Various operations, such as copying, concatenation, tokenization and searching are supported. For character strings, the standard library uses the convention that strings are null-terminated: a string of n characters is represented as an array of n + 1 elements, the last of which is a "NUL character" with numeric value 0.
re2c is a free and open-source lexer generator for C, C++, D, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, OCaml, Python, Rust, V and Zig. It compiles declarative regular expression specifications to deterministic finite automata. Originally written by Peter Bumbulis and described in his paper, re2c was put in public domain and has been since maintained by volunteers. It is the lexer generator adopted by projects such as PHP, SpamAssassin, Ninja build system and others. Together with the Lemon parser generator, re2c is used in BRL-CAD. This combination is also used with STEPcode, an implementation of ISO 10303 standard.
RE/flex is a free and open source computer program written in C++ that generates fast lexical analyzers in C++. RE/flex offers full Unicode support, indentation anchors, word boundaries, lazy quantifiers, and performance tuning options. RE/flex accepts Flex lexer specifications and offers options to generate scanners for Bison parsers. RE/flex includes a fast C++ regular expression library.
