how to truncate long matching lines returned by grep or ack

Question

I want to run ack or grep on html files that often have very long lines. I don't want to see very long lines that wrap repeatedly. But I do want to see just that portion of a long line that surrounds a string that matches the regular expression. How can I get this using any combination of unix tools?

Answer 1

You could use the grep option -o, possibly in combination with changing your pattern to ".{0,10}<original pattern>.{0,10}" in order to see some context around it:

       -o, --only-matching
              Show only the part of a matching line that matches PATTERN.

..or -c:

       -c, --count
              Suppress normal output; instead print a count of matching  lines
              for  each  input  file.  With the -v, --invert-match option (see
              below), count non-matching lines.

Answer 2

Pipe your results thru cut. I'm also considering adding a --cut switch so you could say --cut=80 and only get 80 columns.