Like grep for the whole word

Question

I use the following command for grep stuff in subdirs

find . | xargs grep -s 's:text' 

However, it also finds things like <s:textfield name="sdfsf"...../>

What can I do to avoid this, so it just finds things like <s:text name="sdfsdf"/>

OR, for that matter ... also finds <s:text somethingElse="lkjkj" name="lkkj"

basically s:text and name should be on the same line ....

Answer 1

You want the -w option to indicate that this is the end of a word.

find . | xargs grep -sw 's:text'

Answer 2

You can refuse the xargs command by doing a grep search recursively. And you usually don't need the 's' flag. Hence:

 grep -wr 's:text' 

Answer 3

Use \b to match word boundaries, which will make your search match only for whole words.

So your grep would look like

 grep -r "\bSTRING\b" 

adding colors and line numbers can also help

 grep --color -rn "\bSTRING\b" 

From http://www.regular-expressions.info/wordboundaries.html :

There are three different positions as word boundaries:

• Before the first character in a string, if the first character is a word character.
• After the last character in a line, if the last character is a word character.
• Between two characters in a string, where one is a word symbol and the other is not a word symbol.

Answer 4

If you want to filter out a portion of the remainder text, you can do this.

xargs grep -s 's:text '

This should only find instances of s:text with a space after the last t. If you need to find instances of s:text that have only a name element, either pass the results to another grep expression, or use a regular expression to filter only those elements that you need.

Answer 5

you can try rg, https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep :

 rg -w 's:text' . 

gotta do it