Hi there!
Usually, sed can be used in different ways, but most of the time we use it to match lines in a file against a fixed regexp. Some examples:
This replaces ocurrences of regexp for “foo”:
sed 's/regexp/foo/g' < myfile
This prints all lines that have “foo”, but will change the first “o” in the line for an “a”:
sed -n '/foo/s/o/a/p' < myfile
and so on…
But I tried to do a different thing, with no success: can I pass to sed a file with a bunch of regular expressions and test them against a fixed string? I tried to play with pattern space, hold space, with no success. It just seems impossible to use them (which would be the closest to “variables”) in search commands.
I know sed is Turing complete, but using it that way would maybe require to implement a regexp engine from scratch?
Thanks!
IMO if you’re doing something that complex you shouldn’t be using
sed
, but yeah you can probably do this something like:while read REGEX; do sed "$REGEX" << EOF your test string EOF done <list_of_regexes.txt
I strongly recommend you don’t do that though. It will be absolutely full of quoting bugs. Instead write a script in a proper language to do it. I recommend Deno, or maybe even Rust.
If you use Rust you can also use
RegexSet
which will be much faster (if you just want to find matches anyway). Here’s what ChatGPT made me. Not tested but it looks vaguely right.use regex::RegexSet; use std::fs::File; use std::io::{self, BufRead}; use std::path::Path; fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> { // Define the fixed input string let input_string = "This is a test string for regex matching."; // Path to the file containing the regexes let regex_file_path = "regexes.txt"; // Read regexes from the file let regexes = read_lines(regex_file_path)? .filter_map(Result::ok) // Filter out errors .collect::<Vec<String>>(); // Create a RegexSet from the regexes let regex_set = RegexSet::new(®exes)?; // Find the regexes that match the input string let matches: Vec<_> = regex_set.matches(input_string).into_iter().collect(); // Print the matches if matches.is_empty() { println!("No regexes matched the input string."); } else { println!("Regexes that matched the input string:"); for index in matches { println!(" - {}", regexes[index]); } } Ok(()) } // Helper function to read lines from a file fn read_lines<P>(filename: P) -> io::Result<io::Lines<io::BufReader<File>>> where P: AsRef<Path>, { let file = File::open(filename)?; Ok(io::BufReader::new(file).lines()) }
Way over engineered.
Both grep and sed take pattern files as input
For sed, the -f flag
For grep, -f