Question

I would like to grep the text start from:

NSLocalizedStringFile(@"

and endWith

")

and I use this to grep:

(NSLocalizedStringFile\(@")()|(\);)

but it seems that my regular expression doesn’t work, wt did I do wrong? Thank you.

Answer 1

The following command seems to do it. I use the -P (perl-style regexp) flag to grep to make it easier to search for a multi-line string, since I wasn’t sure if the start & end strings were expected to appear on the same line.

grep -P '(NSLocalizedStringFile\(@")[\s\S]*?"\)' foo.txt

Here’s the contents of my test file:

this should not be included
NSLocalizedStringFile(@"
this should be included
")
this should not be included

Note that (as is typical of regexps), this won’t do any matching of (‘s with )’s.