grep replacement with extensive regular expression implementation

Question

I have been using grepWin for general searching of files, and wingrep when I want to do replacements or what-have-you.

GrepWin has an extensive implementation of regular expressions, however doesn't do replacements (as mentioned above).

Wingrep does replacements, however has a severely limited range of regular expression implementation.

Does anyone know of any (preferably free) grep tools for windows that does replacement AND has a reasonable implementation of regular expressions?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I use Cygwin quite a lot for this sort of task.

Unfortunately it has the world's most unintuitive installer, but once it's installed correctly it's very usable... well apart from a few minor issues with copy and paste and the odd issue with line-endings.

The good thing is that all the tools work like on a real GNU system, so if you're already familiar with Linux or similar, you don't have to learn anything new (apart from how to use that crazy installer).

Overall I think the advantages make up for the few usability issues.

Answer 2

I think perl at the command line is the answer you are looking for. Widely portable, powerful regex support.

Let's say that you have the following file:

foo
bar
baz
quux

you can use

perl -pne 's/quux/splat!/' -i /tmp/foo

to produce

foo
bar
baz
splat!

The magic is in Perl's command line switches:

• -e: execute the next argument as a perl command.
• -n: execute the command on every line
• -p: print the results of the command, without issuing an explicit 'print' statement.
• -i: make substitutions in place. overwrite the document with the output of your command... use with caution.

Answer 3

If you are on Windows, you can use vbscript (requires no downloads). It comes with regex. eg change "one" to "ONE"

Set objFS=CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set objArgs = WScript.Arguments
strFile = objArgs(0)
Set objFile = objFS.OpenTextFile(strFile)
strFileContents = objFile.ReadAll
Set objRE = New RegExp
objRE.Global     = True
objRE.IgnoreCase = False
objRE.Pattern = "one"
strFileContents = objRE.Replace(strFileContents,"ONE") 'simple replacement
WScript.Echo strFileContents

output

C:\test>type file
one
two one two
three

C:\test>cscript //nologo test.vbs file
ONE
two ONE two
three

You can read up vbscript doc to learn more on using regex