I have
text text text [text text] \n
text text text [text text] \n
I want
text text text \n
text text text \n
What RE can I use?
views:
59answers:
3
+2
A:
/[^\[]*/ gets you most of the way. If nothing ever appears after [...], then it is sufficient.
wallyk
2010-09-04 00:02:13
The OP may want to add a space on one end or th'other of that regex, if spaces are interesting.
dash-tom-bang
2010-09-04 00:05:00
Can you explain what else you're going to do with that RE? It matches a pattern of 'anything but backslash or open square bracket', so you have some work to do to use it in a substitute operation, don't you?
Jonathan Leffler
2010-09-04 00:17:14
+4
A:
The following works regardless of whether the \n is the end of line or a backslash and a letter 'n':
sed 's/\[.*] //' $file
The pattern looks for an open square bracket followed by any sequence of characters up to the last close square bracket and a following space (if there are several). You could refine the '.*' into '[^]]*' to match anything that is not a close square bracket; this only deletes to the first close square bracket.
Jonathan Leffler
2010-09-04 00:08:33
+1
A:
you can use awk
$ more file
text [dont want text here ] text text [ dont want text] \n
text text text [ dont want text] \n
$ awk -vRS=']' '/\[/{gsub(/\[.*/,"")}1' ORS="" file
text text text \n
text text text \n
ghostdog74
2010-09-04 04:44:39