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Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2012 12:47:52 -0400
From: Ronald J Kimball <r...@tamias.net>
To: bbedit@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Greppng
Message-ID: <20121101164752.GB61782@penkwe.pair.com>
References: <906BAD1E-E8A7-4ECB-8B24-A30311A3DCC0@kreme.com>
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On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 10:40:21AM -0600, LuKreme wrote:
> I want to grep for words in a file that contain 'a' 'b' and 'c' in any order. I also want to find words that contain two c's, even if not together (so access and chance).
> 
> I might even want words with two c's AND a and b, again in any order.
> 
> I feel like I am forgetting something basic.

True regular expressions are not well-suited to finding substrings in
arbitrary order.  However, you could do this using look-ahead:

(?i)(?=[a-z]*a)(?=[a-z]*b)(?=[a-z]*c[a-z]*c)([a-z]+)

This regular expression works in Perl; I haven't tested it in BBEdit.

Ronald