Can't understand this grep line

Asked Mar 24 '22 at 18:59

Active Mar 24 '22 at 18:59

Viewed 24 times

Hi I have a script that contains this command of grep:

NOTE: $1 is a path e.g /tmp/some_rand_dir

grep -oPm1 "(?<=<string name=\"app_name\">)[^<]+" "$1/res/values/strings.xml"

and I can't understand what is it doing... Any help would be great :)

I tried to break it apart and trying to seperate the flags but I couldn't figure it out

asked Mar 24 '22 at 18:59

Noft

`o` means to return just the matched part of the line. `P` means use PCRE. `m1` means stop after the first matching line. That's all in the man page. – Barmar Mar 24 '22 at 19:07
Yeah I know the usage of the flags but I don't understand the string. is it searching exactly for (?<=)[^ – Noft Mar 24 '22 at 19:10
The part inside `(<=...)` is a lookbehind. So it's matching everything that matches `[^ – Barmar Mar 24 '22 at 19:18
Basically, it's returning the text between `` and the next ` – Barmar Mar 24 '22 at 19:19
So it's basically looking for the string: "" ? if so then what does [^ – Noft Mar 25 '22 at 14:16
`[^ – Barmar Mar 25 '22 at 14:40
Thanks! You have any tutorial to recommend on? – Noft Mar 25 '22 at 16:18
www.regular-expression.info – Barmar Mar 25 '22 at 16:19

0 Answers0