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I'm looking for a way to grep things like: i log for E M, i 1 f x i 0, I xi 1, 3 1,. simply based on number of characters.
Nothing in that hypothetical output is longer than three characters. This hypothetical one-liner would look something like, grep -v [:alnum:] > {3}. (Except I just don't know how to write that in grep syntax.)
grep -o -w '\w\{1,3\}' data
Options are:
It matches only words (in grep \w = [[:alnum:]] = [A-Za-z0-9]) of length from 1 to 3 (specified by {1,3})
,and.as part of a word? – user13742 Feb 24 '12 at 17:31