Question

I’ve got some textfiles that hold names, phone numbers and region codes. One combination per line.

The syntax is always “Name Region_code number”
With any number of spaces between the 3 variables.

What I want to do is search for specific region codes, like 23 or 493, forexample.
The problem is that these numbers might appear in the longer numbers too, which might enable a return that shouldn’t have been returned.

I was thinking of this sort of command:
grep '04' numbers.txt

But if I do that, a line that contains 04 in the number but not as region code will show as a result too… which is not correct.

Answer 1

I’m sure you are about to get buried in clever regular expressions, but I think in this case all you need to do is include one of the spaces on each side of your region code in the grep.

grep ' 04 ' numbers.txt