How to do a case insensitive search in ed line editor

Question

I am trying to do a regex search with ed.

e.g.

Is there an expression that will match any case variation on the word "prop"

prop, PROP, Prop, etc. ?

I found the following additional references

ed manual

which refers to

Base Definitions volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, Section 9.3, Basic Regular Expressions

GNU Basic Regular Expressions (grep, ed, sed)

Thanks - [pP][rR][oO][Pp] works. I wasn't able to use (?i)prop - Maybe I used it wrong. I tried: /(?i)prop and also /(?i)prop/ - neither works. Following your comment I am looking further into POSIX regex. Thanks — RaamEE, Mar 26 '17 at 18:47
I am looking into ex - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_(text_editor) - it supports turning on\off search case sensitivity. — RaamEE, Mar 26 '17 at 19:27

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 26 '17 at 19:16

The ed regular expression syntax, being a sort of a POSIX regular expression standard, does not seem to support case insensitive modifiers.

You may use bracket expressions containing both upper- and lowercase letter variants:

[Pp][Rr][Oo][Pp]

where [Pp] matches a p or P, etc.

If you plan to match prop as a whole word, you will need to use \< in front (it matches the beginning of a word) and a \> at the end of the expression (it matches the end of a word).

How to do a case insensitive search in ed line editor

1 Answers1