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→INVESTIGATION 1: SIMPLE & COMPLEX REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
# Let's issue a command to display strings that contain more than one occurrence of the letter "x":<br><span style="color:blue;font-weight:bold;font-family:courier;">grep "xx*" textfile1.txt</span><br><br>Why did this work? because the pattern indicates one occurrence of the letter "x",<br>followed by zero or MORE occurrences of the letter "x".<br><br>If you combine the complex regular expression symbols ".*" it will act like<br>zero or more occurrences of any character (i.e. like "*" did in filename expansion).<br><br>
# Issue the following command to match strings begin and end with a number with nothing or anything inbetween:<br><span style="color:blue;font-weight:bold;font-family:courier;">grep "^[0-9].*[0-9]$" textfile1.txt</span><br><br>Using '''simultaneous anchors''' combined with the ".*" symbol(s) can help you to refine your search patterns of strings.<br><br>
# Issue the following linux pipeline command to display strings that begin with a capital letter,<br>end with a number, and contains a capital X somewhere inbetween:<br><span style="color:blue;font-weight:bold;font-family:courier;">grep "^[A-Z].*X.*[0-9]$" textfile1.txt</span><br><br>Let's look at another series of examples involving searching for strings that only contain '''valid numbers'''.<br>We will use '''pipeline commands ''' to both display stdout to the screen and save to files<br>for confirmation of running these pipeline commands when running run a '''checking-script ''' later in this investigation.<br><br>
# Issue the following Linux command to create the '''regexps''' directory: <span style="color:blue;font-weight:bold;font-family:courier;">mkdir ~/regexps</span><br><br>
# Change to the '''regexps''' directory and confirm that you have moved to this directory.<br><br>