[ILUG] Multi line regular expression help

[John McCormac]

On 01/12/2011 07:25, Marcus Furlong wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to do a multine regexp that matches the following expressions:
>
> <tag>(FR) text
>
> <tag>  - (FR) text
>
> <tag>  (FR)
> text
>
> <tag>
> (FR) text
>
> <tag>
>   - (FR) text
>
> <tag>
> othertext - (FR) text
>
> <tag>othertext - (FR) text
>
> <tag>othertext -
> (FR) text
>
> and replaces them with
>
> <tag language="FR">
> text
>
> As a bonus, if "othertext" exists, I'd also like to put that into an attribute.
>
> I have tried egrep, perl and sed but I cannot seem to get it. I can
> match the single line ones fine, but not the multi line ones. None of
> the examples I've seen online help me, apart from removing newlines
> altogether, but I cannot do that, as further processing depends on the
> newlines being there.

Well the /g global replace option might be a bit too greedy on this but 
it should span the newlines.
(eg: sed 's/<tag>/<tag language="FR">/g' )

You could temporarily replace the newlines with a character that does 
not normally appear and then change it back after processing. You could 
also loop over each individual line for the "othertext". With some 
flavours of regexp, you may have to escape the angle brackets. I think 
that sed has an -f option to read the regexps from a file so this might 
allow you to adopt a more understandable multi regexp approach without 
an awful one line regexp.

Regards...jmcc
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