Re: bash aesthetics question: special characters in reg exp in [[ ... =~~ ... ]]

On 7/22/24 3:59 PM, Kenny McCormack wrote:

Note: this is just a question of aesthetics.  Functionally, it all works as
expected.
 Sample bash code:
      f="$(fortune)" # Get some multi-line output into "f"
     # Look for foo followed by bar on the same line
     [[ "$f" =~ foo[^$'\n']*bar ]] && echo "foo bar"
 The point is you need the "anything other than a newline" or else it might
match foo on one line and bar on a later line.  The above is the only way I
could figure out to express a newline in the particular flavor of reg exps
used by the =~ operator.
 The problem is that if the above is in a function, when you list out the
function with "type funName", the \n has already been digested and
converted to a hard newline.  This makes the listing look strange.  I'd
rather see "\n".
 Is there any way to get this?
 

Not sure this really addresses your 'type funcName' query but maybe somewhat better output from 'type funcName' ? :
     ...
     regex=$(printf 'foo[^$\n]*bar')
     [[ "$f" =~ $regex ]] && echo "foo bar"
Kind of wish the regex string could be bracketed by "/" as in awk.