hi, me again with prob guru.... i have a .txt file with numeric and words together eg . hello 1
2 how
are 3 you

which pattern do u used to get just the numeric ? eg 1 2 3
i tried many pattern .... grep [0-9] test.txt , i tried from * to ?
can u help me guru

Are you wanting to edit the input line to produce just the numeric portion? If so, grep is not the tool to use. Try sed...

sed 's/[^0-9]//g'

This will substitute every character NOT (that's the ^) in [0-9] for an empty string.

HTH

yes, i am trying to get the numeric in the text file and sum it up ... thanx guru, never thought sed can do that

guru, just say that one of the words in the txt is "world4" but i dont want the 4 to be part of the output, what pattern can be used for it ?

This would work for that specific example...

sed 's/[a-Z][a-Z]*[0-9]*//g'

the sed for that is not working
i have error : sed: -e expression #1, char 22: Invalid range end

btw, can u explain briefly ? i can't seem to understand why twice the [a-Z]

edit : my txt consist of hello 1
2 how
are 3 you
today4

so my output should be 1 2 3 only ... can't seem to ge the correct pattern....

Different version of sed!

Replace a-Z with a-zA-Z.

The * matches 0 or more occurences, you want at least one.

The following are all the same but I wouldn';t expect them all to work on all versions of sed...

[a-z][a-z]*
[a-z]+
[a-z]\{1,\}

thanx , this sed 's/[a-z][A-Z]*[0-9]*//g' test.txt works ... but if you dont mind, can plz explain a bit ? i really want to learn , thanx guru

substitute/this/forThis/globally

The 'this' pattern breaks down as...

1 character in the range a-Z followed by zero or more characters in the range a-Z followed by zero or more characters in the range 0-9.

This would match:

world4
world
world44

but not...

world 4
4


HTH

thanx guru for helping me learn one or more thing