Question

I’m trying to search my codebase for instances of the following pattern:

m_vParts[foo] = 

And similar instances with varying whitespace. So I can up with this regex:

m_vParts\[.*\]\s*=[^=]\s*

When I test this at http://gskinner.com/RegExr/ and other regex-tester type sites, it finds exactly what I want. However, when I actually grep (or egrep) I get no results. My guess is my regex isn’t well-formed for grep‘s dialect of regexes, but I’m not sure exactly where I’m off.

Here is the actual command I give:

[e]grep -Irn "m_vParts\[.*\]\s*=[^=]\s*" .

I’ve tried with both single and double quotes.

Here’s a small sample of code that is exemplary of the codebase:

pcTab->m_vParts[iLastPart] = pcPart;
if ( m_pcCurrentTab->m_vParts[i]== pcPart )

I would expect that the first line would be a match, and the second line would not.

Also, I should note that I’m using GnuWin32 grep on Windows 7 x64.

Thanks in advance for any guidance here; very much trying to avoid the non-automated search 🙂

Answer 1

Just add quotes around the re:

$ vim 1.txt
$ egrep 'm_vParts\[.*\]\s*=[^=]\s*' 1.txt
pcTab->m_vParts[iLastPart] = pcPart;

As you can see, all works.