How to extract regex matches from a file on windows

Question

I use lot of regular expressions. I'm using EditPadpro for all my editing purposes. Most of the time I'll have to extract all the regex matches in the file to another file. Is there any software that can do this?

Example:

While working with contacts file. I need to extract all email addresses to another file.

Answer 1

RegexBuddy, the sister product to EditPad Pro does this very nicely via it's Grep tab. Will recurse through folders and extract matches to a file. It's also great for building and testing regular expresions.

Use the settings as below:

• You can add the pre-built email regex from the 'Library' tab
• Make sure you select the 'Match' button on the top toolbar
• Enter the file details on the 'Grep' tab and select 'Save results into a single file'

You can test the regex by pasting a section of your file into the 'Test' tab.

• Press 'Execute' from the 'Grep' drop-down to run.

Answer 2

grep

Answer 3

I'm surprised that no-one noted findstr yet. It has at least rudimentary regular expression support with the /r switch and exists on every semi-recent Windows version (at least down to 2000).

Answer 4

Install Cygwin, it will give you a very functional unix-like environment on windows. Then learn basic grep, egrep, awk, sed or perl. Time very well invested. Just a few examples:

# extract email addresses from text.txt to emails.txt
egrep -o '[[:alnum:].]+@[[:alnum:].]+' < text.txt > emails.txt
# extract third whitespace separated column from lines starting with "DEBUG"
awk '/^DEBUG/ { print $3 }' < text.txt > debug.txt
# replace multiple whitespace characters with one space
perl -pe 's/[\t ]+/ /g' < text.txt > clean.txt

Answer 5

Many Windows text editors (but not notepad) include "Find in Files" functions which support regular expressions.

PowerShell has Select-String which will do regular expression matching.

Or a Windows grep port.