> Is that a single string? It depends what you're looking at, the
> sequences of non white space in the log? No. The patter that I'm
> matching ya.
"string" in this context is the input you're attempting to match against. `egrep` will attempt to match your pattern against each "line" of text it reads from the files its searching. That is, each line in your log file(s).
But consider what `[ :[:digit:]]{11}` means: you've got a character class consisting of space, colon and a digit; {11} means "match any of the characters in that class exactly 11 times" (as opposed to other variations on the '{}' syntax that say "at least m times", "at most n times", or "between n and m times"). But that'll match all sorts of things that don't look like 'dd hh:mm:ss':
term% egrep '[ :[:digit:]]{11}'
11111111111
11111111111
111111111
1111111111111
1111111111111
::::::::::::::::
::::::::::::::::
aaaa bbbbb
aaaa bbbbb
term%
(The first line is my typing; the second is output from egrep except for the short line of 9 '1's, for which egrep had no output. That last two lines are matching space characters and egrep echoing the match, but I'm guessing gmail will eat those.)
Note that there are inputs with more than 11 characters that match; this is because there is some 11-character substring that matches the RE in those lines. In any event, I suspect this would generally not be what you want. But if nothing else in your input can match the RE (which you might know a priori because of domain knowledge about whatever is generating those logs) then it's no big deal, even if the RE was capable of matching more things generally.
> > Using character classes would greatly simplify what you're trying to
> > do. It seems like this could be simplified to (untested) snippet:
>
> Agreed.
>
> I'm starting with the examples that came with; "^\w{3} [
> :[:digit:]]{11}", the logcheck package that I'm working with and
> evaluating what I want to do.
Ah. I suspect this relies on domain knowledge about the format of log lines to match reliably. Otherwise it could match, `___ 123 456:789` which is probably not what you are expecting.
> I actually like the idea of dividing out the following:
>
> - months that have 31 days: Jan, Mar, May, Jul, Aug, Oct, and Dec
> - months that have 30 days: Apr, Jun, Sep, Nov
> - month that have 28/29 days: Feb
Sure. One nice thing about `egrep` et al is that you can put the REs into a file and include them with `-f`, as opposed to having them all directly on the command line.
> > ( [1-9]|[12][[0-9]]|3[01]) [0-2][0-9]:[0-5][0-9]:[0-5][0-9]
>
> Aside: Why do you have the double square brackets in "[12][[0-9]]"?
Typo. :-)
> > For this, I'd probably eschew `[:digit:]`. Named character classes
> > are for handy locale support, or in lieu of typing every character
> > in the alphabet (though we can use ranges to abbreviate that), but
> > it kind of seems like that's not coming into play here and, IMHO,
> > `[0-9]` is clearer in context.
>
> ACK
>
> "[[:digit:]]+" was a construct that I'm parroting. It and
> [.:[:xdigit:]]+ are good for some things. But they definitely aren't
> the best for all things.
>
> Hence trying to find the line of being more accurate without going too far.
>
> > It's not clear to me that dates, in their generality, can be
> > matched with regular expressions. Consider leap years; you'd almost
> > necessarily have to use backtracking for that, but I admit I haven't
> > thought it through.
>
> Given the context that these extended regular expressions are going to
> be used in, logcheck -- filtering out known okay log entries to email
> what doesn't get filtered -- I'm okay with having a few things slip
> through like leap day / leap seconds / leap frogs.
That seems reasonable.
> > `\w` is a GNU extension; I'd probably avoid it on portability grounds
> > (though `\b` is very handy).
>
> I hear, understand, and acknowledge your concern. At present, these
> filters are being used in a package; logcheck,
Aside: I found the note on it's website amusing: Brought to you by the UK's best gambling sites! "Only gamble with what you can afford to lose." Yikes!
> which I believe is
> specific to Debian and ilk. As such, GNU grep is very much a thing.
I'd proceed with caution here; it also seems to be in the FreeBSD and DragonFly ports collections and Homebrew on the Mac (but so is GNU grep for all of those).
> I'm also not a fan of the use of `\w` and would prefer to (...|...) things.
Yeah. IMHO `\w` is too general for what you're trying to do.
> > The thing about regular expressions is that they describe regular
> > languages, and regular languages are those for which there exists a
> > finite automaton that can recognize the language. An important class
> > of finite automata are deterministic finite automata; by definition,
> > recognition by such automata are linear in the length of the input.
> >
> > However, construction of a DFA for any given regular expression can be
> > superlinear (in fact, it can be exponential) so practically speaking,
> > we usually construct non-deterministic finite automata (NDFAs) and
> > "simulate" their execution for matching. NDFAs generalize DFAs (DFAs
> > are a subset of NDFAs, incidentally) in that, in any non-terminal
> > state, there can be multiple subsequent states that the machine can
> > transition to given an input symbol. When executed, for any state,
> > the simulator will transition to every permissible subsequent state
> > simultaneously, discarding impossible states as they become evident.
> >
> > This implies that NDFA execution is superlinear, but it is bounded,
> > and is O(n*m*e), where n is the length of the input, m is the number
> > of nodes in the state transition graph corresponding to the NDFA, and
> > e is the maximum number of edges leaving any node in that graph (for
> > a fully connected graph, that would m, so this can be up to O(n*m^2)).
> > Construction of an NDFA is O(m), so while it's slower to execute, it's
> > actually possible to construct in a reasonable amount of time. Russ's
> > excellent series of articles that Clem linked to gives details and
> > algorithms.
>
> I only vaguely understand those three paragraphs as they are deeper
> computer science than I've gone before.
>
> I think I get the gist of them but could not explain them if my life
> depended upon it.
Basically, a regular expression is a regular expression if you can build a machine with no additional memory that can tell you whether or not a given string matches the RE examining its input one character at a time.
> > In practical terms? Basically, don't worry about it too much. Egrep
> > will generate an NDFA simulation that's going to be acceptably fast
> > for all but the weirdest cases.
>
> ACK
>
> It sounds like I can make any reasonable extended regular expression a
> human can read and I'll probably be good.
I think that's about right.
> Thank you for the detailed response Dan. :-)
- Dan C.