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I have an issue with bash and its regex match ability that I for now think is a bug in bash but could also be me having missed something obvious. I hope it is the latter.

I have made this function in a bash script to spilt an address into fields. There is some debug output that will be removed eventually:

# name number, zip
function split_address
{
    local adr
    adr="$4"
    echo $adr
    local adr_regex
    adr_regex="[ ]*(.*[a-z ]) ([^,][^,]*),[ ]*([^ ]*)[ ]*"
    [[ $adr =~ $adr_regex ]]
    echo 1:X${BASH_REMATCH[1]}X
    echo 2:X${BASH_REMATCH[1]%% }X
    echo 3:Y${BASH_REMATCH[2]}Y
    echo 4:Y${BASH_REMATCH[2]%% }Y
    local x="${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
    echo 5:X${x%% }X
    local x="${BASH_REMATCH[1]%% }"
    echo 6:X${x}X
    echo 7:X${x%% }X
    eval "$1='${BASH_REMATCH[1]%% }'"
    eval "$2='${BASH_REMATCH[2]%% }'"
    eval "$3='${BASH_REMATCH[3]}'"
}

I test it like this:

split_address roadname number zip "  Some string   42 dp ,  1234  "
echo X${roadname}X Y${number}Y Z${zip}Z

When called, I get this output:

Some string 42 dp , 1234
1:XSome string X
2:XSome string X
3:Y42 dp Y
4:Y42 dpY
5:XSome string X
6:XSome string X
7:XSome stringX
XSome string X Y42 dpY Z1234Z

First note that 4 has the space shown in 3 removed. This is what I want to happen in 2 when working on 1. Notice that 5 does not get the space removed even though this happens on the variable x. This was an attempt to work around this issue. Then I tried assigning the space-removing operation to the variable x but that also failed (shown in 6). But removing spaces on x in step 7 worked even though the line is identical to 5 and the input apparently as well.

Is this me doing something weird or is this a bug in bash?

For reference, I am working on Ubuntu 14 LTS with bash version 4.3.11(1)-release.

I see the same behavior with Cygwin-x64 with bash version 4.1.17(9-release.

I have verified that the character to be removed in deed is a space (using od on both source and test-call).

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6
  • Call echo "$addr" and you'll see the difference. Let answer how many spaces after string and how many you can strip by ${...%% }
    – Costas
    Commented Dec 1, 2014 at 11:45
  • Why would you use bash as opposed to perl or text processing utilities for that?
    – Stéphane Chazelas
    Commented Dec 1, 2014 at 11:46
  • Additionally you should remember that echo do substitute some trailing field separators (like a space e.g.) by one if you didn't put arguments into quotes.
    – Costas
    Commented Dec 1, 2014 at 11:52
  • Hmm I built the script under the assumption that %% would remove 1 or more copies of the substring listed. But it makes pathname expansion and that explains why my script fails. I find a different route.
    – galmok
    Commented Dec 1, 2014 at 12:20
  • As for me much easy to change regex string adr_regex="[ ]*(.*[a-z])[ ]*([0-9][^,]*),[ ]*([^ ]*)[ ]*" or better include some separator into input string (for example ;) and use it in regex.
    – Costas
    Commented Dec 1, 2014 at 22:19

2 Answers 2

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%% does glob matching, not regex. That means ${foo%% } will remove the longest trailing string matching a single space character, which of course is just a single space character, and ${foo%% *} will remove the longest trailing string starting with a space character.

You'll probably be better off using awk to split the string into fields.

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Following the solution giving by https://stackoverflow.com/questions/369758/how-to-trim-whitespace-from-bash-variable I fixed my script this way:

echo "8:X${BASH_REMATCH[1]%"${BASH_REMATCH[1]##*[![:space:]]}"}X"
eval "$1='${BASH_REMATCH[1]%"${BASH_REMATCH[1]##*[![:space:]]}"}'"

This is a double string manipulation and the first/inner part removes everything except the trailing spaces. This string is then used to cut off the same spaces at the end of the original string.

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