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regex

Is it possible to get a list of strings from a regex?

Is there a Linux command or software library that returns a list of strings matching a regex it is given as input?

For example, \d would return 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.

Given that regexes are already quite power-consuming I'd be really suprised if this was the case. Still, if such a solution does not exist, what alternatives are there?

Solution

  • If using a python parsing module is an option, there is a pyparsing script to expand a regular expression into "all" possible matching strings.

    Using its invert(regex) function, the code

    for text in invert('\d'):
    print(text)

    will have the output

    0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9