AWK - how to reduce the greed of a regular expression?

Question

I have an example:

echo "@article{gjn2010jucs, Author =   {Grzegorz J. Nalepa}, " | awk '{ sub(/@.*,/,""); print }'

Is it possible to write a regular expression that selects the shorter pattern?

@article{gjn2010jucs,

Instead of a long pattern?:

@article{gjn2010jucs, Author =   {Grzegorz J. Nalepa},

I want to get this result:

Author =   {Grzegorz J. Nalepa},

EDIT:

I have another example:

echo ",article{gjn2010jucs, Author =   {Grzegorz J. Nalepa}, " | awk '{ sub(/,[^,]*,/,""); print }'

Is it possible to write a regular expression that selects the shorter pattern?

, Author =   {Grzegorz J. Nalepa},

Instead of a long pattern?:

,article{gjn2010jucs, Author =   {Grzegorz J. Nalepa},

I want to get this result:

,article{gjn2010jucs

Answer 1

If you want to select @ and up to the first , after that, you need to specify it as @[^,]*,

That is @ followed by any number (*) of non-commas ([^,]) followed by a comma (,).

Answer 2

There isn't a way in awk to do non-greedy matching. You may be able to get the desired output, though. sch's suggestion will work for that line. If you can't rely on a comma, but "Author" is always the start of the what you want, you could do this:

awk '{ sub(/@.*Author/,"Author"); print }'

If the number of characters preceding Author is always the same, you could do this:

awk '{ sub(/@.{21}/,""); print }'

You just need to know what your data looks like across the whole set.

Answer 3

sch's answer is good for basic and extended regexp (as found in most dialects of grep, sed, awk, etc)....it's what I would have answered if he hadn't beaten me to it :)

Perl also has a non-greedy operator which can be used in perl scripts and anything that uses PCRE ("Perl Compatible Regular Expressions"). e.g. also implemented in GNU grep's -P option.

PCRE is not identical to perl's regular expressions, but it is very close. It is a popular choice of RE library for many programs because it's very fast, and the perl enhancements to extended regexp are very useful.

from the perlre(1) man page:

       By default, a quantified subpattern is "greedy", that is, it will match
       as many times as possible (given a particular starting location) while
       still allowing the rest of the pattern to match.  If you want it to
       match the minimum number of times possible, follow the quantifier with
       a "?".  Note that the meanings don't change, just the "greediness":

           *?        Match 0 or more times, not greedily
           +?        Match 1 or more times, not greedily
           ??        Match 0 or 1 time, not greedily
           {n}?      Match exactly n times, not greedily (redundant)
           {n,}?     Match at least n times, not greedily
           {n,m}?    Match at least n but not more than m times, not greedily

Answer 4

There is always a way. The given problem can be solved fairly easily by using commas as separator.

echo "@article{gjn2010jucs, Author =   {Grzegorz J. Nalepa}, " |
awk -F, '{sub(/^[ \t]/, "", $2); print $2}'

When the numbers of fields vary something slightly better is usually needed. In such case finding a stop words often pays off, as you can cut anything out from the line by using them. Within context of the example here's what I mean by stop words.

echo "@article{gjn2010jucs, Author =   {Grzegorz J. Nalepa}, " |
awk  '{sub(/.*Author/, "Author", $0); sub(/},.*/, "}", $0); print $0}'