searching/grepping for words "near" each other

[Andy Bair]

One way to do what you want is to use hipdig.pl which is a utility in
the FTimes suite.  You can download FTimes and read more information
at the following URL.

  http://ftimes.sourceforge.net/FTimes/index.shtml

The hipdig utility is a Perl script that "digs" (searches) for hosts,
IPs, passwords, and custom regular expressions.  The online man page
for hipdig.pl is located at the URL below.

  http://ftimes.sourceforge.net/FTimes/Man+Pages/hipdig.shtml

You can use the hipdig custom type specify a regex that returns
characters around target strings as shown in the following example.
My test file is shown below.

  $ cat /tmp/test.1 

    abc
    foobar
    def
    uvw
    barfoo
    xyz

The command below specifies a custom type (-t) which is a regex that
searches for the string foobar and barfoo that are 0-20 characters
from each other.  Notice that special characters are URL-encoded in
the output so %0a is the newline character.

  $ hipdig.pl -h -t 'custom=(?i)foobar.{0,20}barfoo' /tmp/test.1 

    name|type|tag|offset|string
    "/tmp/test.1"|regexp||4|foobar%0adef%0auvw%0abarfoo

Hope that helps.

Andy

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On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 03:35:55PM +0000, VirginSnow at vfemail.net wrote:
> OK, I know we have a few grep gurus on this list...
> 
> I want to search a text file for a few (alphabetic) words which must
> be "near" each other, but not necessarily on the same line.  "Near"
> could be defined however you like... within a certain number of words
> from each other, a certain number of charecters from each other, or
> some similar constraint.
> 
> Is there any way to do this using grep?  If not, is there some other
> tool (short of a desktop search engine) capable of doing this?
> 
> This seems like a rather elementary search task, so I figure someone
> must have figured a convenient way to do it...
> 
> Any suggestions?
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> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
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