Business
Jobs
  • About Us
  • Solutions
    • Job Postings
      Post your job and receive qualified candidates in 48h.
    • Candidate Assessments
      500+ technical and psychological tests, plus anti-fraud.
    • Headhunting
      Tailor-made executive search from start to finish.
    • Payroll + EOR
      Payroll dispersal and EOR across 15+ LATAM countries.
  • Pricing
  • Jobs

0

301
Views
How to grep multi line string with new line characters or tab characters or spaces

My test file has text like:

> cat test.txt
new dummy("test1", random1).foo("bar1");
new dummy("
        test2", random2);
new dummy("test3", random3).foo("bar3");
new dummy = dummy(
            "test4", random4).foo("bar4");

I am trying to match all single lines ending with semicolon (;) and having text "dummy(". Then I need to extract the string present in the double quotes inside dummy. I have come up with the following command, but it matches only the first and third statement.

> perl -ne 'print if /dummy/ .. /;/' test.txt | grep -oP 'dummy\((.|\n)*,'
dummy("test1",
dummy("test3",

With -o flag I expected to extract string between the double quotes inside dummy. But that is also not working. Can you please give me an idea on how to proceed?

Expected output is:

test1
test2
test3
test4

Some of the below answers work for basic file structures. If lines contains more than 1 new line characters, then code breaks. e.g. Input text files with more new line characters:

new dummy("test1", random1).foo("bar1");
new dummy("
        test2", random2);
new dummy("test3", random3).foo("bar3");
new dummy = dummy(
            "test4", random4).foo("bar4");
new dummy("test5",
        random5).foo("bar5");
new dummy("test6", random6).foo(
        "bar6");
new dummy("test7", random7).foo("
        bar7");

I referred to following SO links:

How to give a pattern for new line in grep?

how to grep multiple lines until ; (semicolon)

over 4 years ago · Santiago Trujillo
3 answers
Answer question

0

@TLP was pretty close:

perl -0777 -nE 'say for map {s/^\s+|\s+$//gr} /\bdummy\(\s*"(.+?)"/gs' test.txt
test1
test2

Using

  • -0777 to slurp the file in as a single string
  • /\bdummy\(\s*"(.+?)"/gs finds all the quoted string content after "dummy(" (with optional whitespace before the opening quote)
    • the s flag allows . to match newlines.
    • any string containing escaped double quotes will break this regex
  • map {s/^\s+|\s+$//gr} trims leading/trailing whitespace from each string.
over 4 years ago · Santiago Trujillo Report

0

This perl should work:

perl -0777 -pe 's/(?m)^[^(]* dummy\(\s*"\s*([^"]+).*/$1/g' file

test1
test2
test3
test4

Following gnu-grep + tr should also work:

grep -zoP '[^(]* dummy\(\s*"\s*\K[^"]+"' file | tr '"' '\n'

test1
test2
test3
test4
over 4 years ago · Santiago Trujillo Report

0

With your shown samples, please try following awk code, written and tested in GNU awk.

awk -v RS='(^|\n)new[^;]*;' '
RT{
  rt=RT
  gsub(/\n+|[[:space:]]+/,"",rt)
  match(rt,/"[^"]*"/)
  print substr(rt,RSTART+1,RLENGTH-2)
}
'  Input_file
over 4 years ago · Santiago Trujillo Report
Answer question
Find remote jobs

Discover the new way to find a job!

Top jobs
Top job categories
Business
Post vacancy Pricing Sales
Legal
Terms and conditions Privacy policy
© 2026 PeakU Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Andres GPT
Show me some job opportunities
There's an error!