Escaped sequence for apt regex

Question

Is there any way to natively escape a sequence in apt's regex?

I have a search, for example libpng++, where I want to literally match the ++ part of the string. I know that I can manually escape the ++ with \+\+, but I need to escape the string (since it comes to me as a variable) instead of simply the manually escape the individual characters.

I've tried apt-cache search libpng++, "libpng++", 'libpng++', \"libpng++\", \'libpng++\', \Qlibpng++\E, etc.

Is there any want to get this to work?

thanks for bringing that up @WiktorStribiżew. I know that I can do that, but the sequences come in as variables to me, I'd really prefer not to have to manually edit each one. I've edited the original question. — StephenG, Dec 10 '17 at 22:22
There is not really a way to escape it. But you could do something like `apt-cache search $(echo libpng++ | sed 's|+|\\+|g')` — Super-intelligent Shade, Dec 10 '17 at 22:38
for one or two characters, you can also use a parameter expansion: `apt-cache search ${var//+/\\+}` — Casimir et Hippolyte, Dec 10 '17 at 23:01

Super-intelligent Shade · Answer 1 · 2017-12-10T22:51:52.083

0

You can "treat" the variable before passing it to apt-cache, as in:

var="libpng++"
var=$(echo $var | sed 's|\([+*?]\)\\\1|g')
apt-cache search $var

Add any other special regex chars between [ and ] above.

edited Dec 10 '17 at 22:51

answered Dec 10 '17 at 22:44

Super-intelligent Shade

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score -1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 12 '19 at 10:52

-1

extra + should work. that is - libpng+++

answered Nov 12 '19 at 10:52

balaganAtomi

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Escaped sequence for apt regex

2 Answers2