Question

I am trying to execute the following pattern in findstr. The findstr is complaining that the

)]%%)

is unexpected at this time.

I passed the following statement

findstr
%EndPageSetup(.+)(%%[((LastPage)|(Page:
\d+))]%%) g:\files\WDDEF07.tmp

WDDE07.tmp is a postscript file.

the file i used is https://rapidshare.com/files/2509921619/WDDEF07.tmp

please help me to solve this error.

Answer 1

I you are running this from a command line or a batch file, the command shell is interpreting | as a pipe, not an alternation like we regexers are used to. In the command shell, | means to take the standard output of the previous command and ‘pipe’ it into the next command’s standard input, like this:

C:\>dir |find ".txt"

I found no reference to alternations in the documentation. If you can find a way to do what you want without alternations, you might try the findstr /G:file option (where file contains the regular expression). This way, you won’t have to fight the command shell’s special characters.