Question

I try to get rows from an XML file with grep, but I’m not so good with regular expressions yet and I don’t know which characters I need to escape in order to get this regular expression string to work:

grep -o -P '<row value="[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.\/:=_]*" count="[0-9]*">[a-zA-Z0-9\-\.\/:=_]*</row>'

I tried escaping every character, but that didn’t work. What is the solution?

Answer 1

You regex does not allow spaces in the text. The text you are trying to match has Test Tester which won’t match your pattern [a-zA-Z0-9\-\.\/:=_ ]*. You need to add a space to it.

Try this:

grep -o -P '<row value="[a-zA-Z0-9\-./:=_]*" count="[0-9]*">[a-zA-Z0-9\-./:=_ ]*</row>'