Date: Thu, 02 Aug 2012 13:20:52 +0200 From: kaltheat <kaltheat@googlemail.com> To: <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: buggy awk regex handling? Message-ID: <743721353.9443.1343906452119.JavaMail.sas1@172.29.249.242>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Hi,
I tried to replace three letters with three letters by awk using the sub-routine.
I assumed that my regular expression does mean the following:
match if three letters of any letter of alphabet occurs anywhere in input
$ echo AbC | awk '{sub(/[[:alpha:]]{3}/,"cBa"); print;}'
AbC
As you can see the result was unexpected.
When I try doing it for at least one letter, it works:
$ echo AbC | awk '{sub(/[[:alpha:]]+/,"cBa"); print;}'
cBa
Same problem without macro:
$ echo AbC | awk '{sub(/[A-Za-z]{3}/,"cBa"); print;}'
AbC
$ echo AbC | awk '{sub(/[A-Za-z]+/,"cBa"); print;}'
cBa
I thought that it might have something to do with the curly braces. But escaping
them doesn't do the trick.
What am I doing wrong?
Or is awk buggy?
Regards,
kaltheat
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?743721353.9443.1343906452119.JavaMail.sas1>