How does character classes work for regex?

Asked Mar 06 '19 at 11:58

Active Mar 06 '19 at 12:01

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I am trying to create a regex match, where I want to match towards multiple character classes (hyphen and \w). For some reason there seems to be some limitation in a(g)awk. This works,

if (match("this is,not-working",/,\w+/)>0) print "Working"

while if I add brackets,

if (match("this is,not-working",/,[\w]+/)>0) print "Working"

it seems to break. The reason I need this is because I want to be able to do [-\w] to match word and hyphen.

How is this possible to do in (g)awk?

asked Mar 06 '19 at 11:58

patrik

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In POSIX regex, you can't put shorthand classes inside bracket expressions, `[\w]` matches ``\`` and `w` – Wiktor Stribiżew Mar 06 '19 at 11:59
@WiktorStribiżew Do you have an optional way to solve this? Btw, this worked fine for perl, though I know it is not the same. – patrik Mar 06 '19 at 12:00
Perl uses its own regex engine that is not POSIX. – Wiktor Stribiżew Mar 06 '19 at 12:01
Thanks @WiktorStribiżew, btw, noticed that this worked fine in this case,`if (match("--",/[-a-zA-Z0-9_]+/)>0) print "Working"`. And also `if (match("--",/[-[:alnum:]_]+/)>0) print "Working"` – patrik Mar 06 '19 at 12:11
Yes, note that `[:alnum:]` is usually preferred when you need to work with all Unicode letters and digits. – Wiktor Stribiżew Mar 06 '19 at 12:14

How does character classes work for regex?

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