1

I want to delete a set of lines (globally) only if the entire pattern matches.

Pattern Description:

Line1:^[#]+ .*

Line2:^[[:space:]]*$

Line3:^-[[:space:]]*$

Line4:^[[:space:]]*$

Line5:^[#]+ .*$|^[-]+[[:space:]]*$

Note:

  1. Line3 can have space(s) after -
  2. Line2 and Line4 may have a space character or should be blank
  3. Line5, either matches ^[#]+ .*$ or ^[-]+[[:space:]]*$
  4. I don't want to delete the last line of the pattern i.e. Line5 in the pattern description.

Example:

# Body

- Inside Body

# Summary

-

# Bibliography

- Read this book

Expected output:

# Body

- Inside Body

# Bibliography

- Read this book

Note: The provided solution works, is it possible to write it more clearly as follows:

e = '(^|\n)[#]+ .*\
    \n[\t ]*\
    \n-[\t ]*\
    \n[\t ]*\
    \n([#]+ .*|[-]+[\t ]*)\n'

Also, how can we do the provided solution for multiple occurrences of the multiline pattern?

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5
  • Do you know the line terminator that will be present? Also would an answer using awk (or any other test processing tool) be acceptable?
    – goodguy5
    Dec 18, 2018 at 13:31
  • I would be happy if its portable to both Windows and uni, if not possible Unix would be preferable. Other scripting languages are also good like awk, python, javascript
    – Porcupine
    Dec 18, 2018 at 13:33
  • Related: sed multiple lines
    – goodguy5
    Dec 18, 2018 at 13:42
  • Is this document in a known format? Does it have a parser?
    – Kusalananda ♦
    Dec 19, 2018 at 13:37
  • @Kusalananda Yes I use a custom format to take notes in markdown files (data files). I have created a script file to remove unnecessary elements of the format (that have not been used) in a temporary file (copy of data files), and then render it with Pandoc.
    – Porcupine
    Dec 19, 2018 at 14:23

1 Answer 1

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2

A python solution, should work for python2 or 3. reads from stdin, outputs to stdout. About the only thing I did was change the expression for [[:space:]] to [\t ].

#!/usr/bin/python3

import sys
import re
e='(^|\n)[#]+ .*\n[\t ]*\n-[\t ]*\n[\t ]*\n([#]+ .*|[-]+[\t ]*)\n'
print(re.sub(e, '\\1\\2\n', sys.stdin.read()))
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7
  • Clarification: Can we do inplace substitution when, read from a file?
    – Porcupine
    Dec 18, 2018 at 14:34
  • linux doesn't have any primitives to do this, as the file changes length. So you need to write to a temporary file and rename. See stackoverflow.com/questions/42429320/… for examples of modules to do it.
    – icarus
    Dec 18, 2018 at 14:44
  • Thanks, I did this and it works: python Code.py < ./Input.md > ./Output.md
    – Porcupine
    Dec 18, 2018 at 15:04
  • Additionally, please see the Note at the end of the question.
    – Porcupine
    Dec 19, 2018 at 13:05
  • I tried to do global replacement using this print(re.sub(e, '\\1\\2\n', sys.stdin.read(), flags=re.MULTILINE)) but it does only once. Could you please have a look? I am using Python3.6
    – Porcupine
    Dec 19, 2018 at 13:29

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