Extending R.E. Syntax (was: Re: Eliminating binary from a text file)

[Omer Zak]

Instead of creating a separate bgrep, it would have been better to be
able to extend the syntax of regular expressions (in egrep, Perl and
other platforms) to allow specification of binary strings having
arbitrary length by means of an hex string.

This would come instead of making it very cumbersome to specify strings
longer than one character (\xnn or \unnnn or equivalent - see also:
http://www.regular-expressions.info/unicode.html).

And if we are at it, it would have been nice to add to all R.E. engines
hooks to allow private extensions of R.E. syntax, in order to allow
people to concisely express special parsing requirements.

--- Omer


On Mon, 2015-07-20 at 21:24 +0300, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> On 20/07/15 11:56, Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda wrote:
> 
> > Hello everyone, 
> > 
> > 
> > I often have damaged text files (due to a lovely storage system).
> > The files are of different formats, although I can usually assume
> > they contain spaces. The files are structured as lines.
> > 
> > 
> > Every once in a while, the lovely destruction (ahm....storage)
> > system inserts binary garbage to the file. I wish to fix the files
> > by removing the cancer without leaving any leftovers. That is, I
> > want to lose partial lines.
> > 
> > 
> > I tried using grep with all sorts of keys, but it did not do the
> > trick.
> > strings catches too little - it leaves partial lines.
> > Is there an elegant  way to  do the trick line-wise?
> > 
> > 
> > Thanks
> > Orna
> > 
> http://debugmo.de/2009/04/bgrep-a-binary-grep/
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