Question regarding grep 2,6,3 regular expression looking for lines without something in a part of a line

Question regarding grep 2,6,3 regular expression looking for lines without something in a part of a line

[Larry W. Virden]

I am using an older version of cygwin on a Windows 7 PC.
I have a file of data that is formatted in character separated value format.
For example, a couple of lines might be:

"Doe, John";"Student";"Senior"
"Admin";"Staff";

Now, I want to perform a grep that returns lines that do not have a
comma in the "first column" of data.

I tried the obvious
grep '^"[^,"]";' file.csv
but did not get the results desired. I got nothing returned - but I
know there are lines like the admin line in the data.

I know there are all sorts of extended regular expression atoms
available; is this a case where I need egrep and something unique to
express the requirements?

-- 

Larry W. Virden
http://www.facebook.com/lvirden/
Even if explicitly stated to the contrary, nothing in this posting
should be construed as representing my employer's opinions.

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Re: Question regarding grep 2,6,3 regular expression looking for lines without something in a part of a line

[Eric Blake]

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On 10/08/2014 08:00 AM, Larry W. Virden wrote:
> I am using an older version of cygwin on a Windows 7 PC.
> I have a file of data that is formatted in character separated value format.
> For example, a couple of lines might be:
> 
> "Doe, John";"Student";"Senior"
> "Admin";"Staff";
> 
> Now, I want to perform a grep that returns lines that do not have a
> comma in the "first column" of data.
> 
> I tried the obvious
> grep '^"[^,"]";' file.csv

That looks for lines containing a literal quote, then exactly one quoted
character that is neither comma nor quote, then another literal quote.
You forgot the *:

'^"[^,"]*";'

Your question is not cygwin-specific.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org


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Re: Question regarding grep 2,6,3 regular expression looking for lines without something in a part of a line

[Nick]

You need a quantifier, such as '+':

grep '^"[^,"]+";' file.csv




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