Grep non-greedy finding is not working for me in this instance

[Greg Raven]

I use Grep in BBEdit a lot for cleaning up websites, but now there's a situation where I'm missing something.

I'm redoing a site from WordPress to static, so there are a bunch of links that look like:

<a href="/posts/post-name/index.html">Post name</a>

I need to change these so the link looks like:

<a href="/posts/post-name.html">Post name</a>

This seems as though it should be simple to find these instances with:

<a href="/posts/.+?/index\.html">

But if a paragraph contains:

<a href="/posts/post-name/index.html">Post name</a>. <a href="/search/index.html">Search here.</a>

It glumps both links (and anything / everything in between) into one found result.

I sorta got it to work with this:

<a href="/posts/[a-z].+?[a-z]/index\.html">

But there has to be a more straightforward way. What am I missing?

[Rick Gordon]

What about:

<a href="/posts/[^>]+/index\.html">

Rick Gordon

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From:	Greg Raven <greg...@gmail.com>
To:	BBEdit Talk <bbe...@googlegroups.com>
Date:	Wed, Dec 18, 2024 10:03:23AM -0700
Subject:	Grep non-greedy finding is not working for me in this instance

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RICK GORDON
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[GP]

Hmm... I don't know what's going wrong with your usage of either grep (<a href="/posts/.+?/index\.html"> or <a href="/posts/[a-z].+?[a-z]/index\.html">). Either one just matches only the <a href="/posts/post-name/index.html"> parts of text strings including strings also containing <a href="/search/index.html">Search here.</a> in them.

The  <a href="/posts/[a-z].+?[a-z]/index\.html"> will restrict finding those stings with only lower case letters in the first and last characters of post-name but that isn't something you're having a problem with.

Could you post a short example containing a <a href post and <a href search string where your grep is glumping the two links together?

[jj]

Hi Greg,

Could it be that there is some space or invisible character before the question mark in your pattern ?

<a href="/posts/.+□?/index\.html">

                  

If it is the case that explains the greedyness.

You can check the characters in your pattern with menu: Window > Palettes > Character Inspector.

HTH,

Jean Jourdain

[Mark Bowron]

The search term

<a href="/posts/[^>]+/index\.html">

only has two regular expressions (grep):

(1) "[^>]+" which translates to "one or more characters that are not >" and

(2) "\." which translates to the period character.  (Because it has a special meaning in grep, when all we want to do is search for a period, the "\" is required to "escape" the special meaning.)

On Thu, Dec 19, 2024 at 5:34 AM Greg Raven <greg...@gmail.com> wrote:

This works, thanks! I don't understand the syntax, but it works. Much appreciated.

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