Searching for script or applet.

I am trying to find a script that I can run on my computer that will perform the following task:

It will look at a list of words and then tell me which words contain a certain string of letters. The string of letters need not be in a particular order. Example: The script will scan a list of names and tell me which names contain all of the letters e g and d in any order or sequence, even if the individual letters are separated by intervening letters.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

ctrl+f

Seriously though, I used to have a script (two actually, but one is in php and is server based)

Both sit in one of quite a few external drives I have laying around. If I find them, I will share with you.

reply to post by azbowhunter

Thanks for the response and for the effort.

If I were ambitious and intelligent I would try to write one myself. I know there are archives of scripts here and there on the web and I might try to search them for what I want, but if someone had already been down that road before me it would be simpler/quicker.

There are many "GREP" programs, none will do a search
involving "string of letters need not be in a particular order."

I don't know of any program or script that will do that.

A program that might come close in the sense of partial
"hit" is dnGrep.

reply to post by fever

Thanks. I'll look into it.

reply to post by fever

I checked out dnGrep. It will do enough of the job to help me out. Thanks for the suggestion.

I wanted to refine my opening post a little. In looking for an answer I found that the "Find" and "Replace" functions in a word processor that allow one to do batch corrections of spelling errors, etc., are useful for my purposes, but I was wondering if there was either a program or script that would recursively "find and replace" a series of letters in a list of words, without having to perform the operation separately for each letter sought.

Any suggestions on this approach would be appreciated.

reply to post by ipsedixit


I would use "sed" for that, say i had a file called "names" containing a list of names and wanted to replace all occurrences of dave for david i would run;

sed -i 's/dave/david/g' names

If you wanted to change multiple characters/strings at once the easiest way would be;

sed -i 's/orange/apple/g; s/salt/vinegar/g' shoppinglist.txt

the trailing "g" on the pattern matching tells sed to replace every occurence.

This would be the easiest way to do it on linux/mac/unix, You can however get sed for windows with this download;
gnuwin32.sourceforge.net...

Be warned it is a command line tool, i'm not aware of any graphical frontend for it. But it does the job quick and easy.

reply to post by InsideYourMind

Thanks for the information. I'll give it a try.

The simple "Replace" function in Notepad does what I want if I enter each letter I want replaced in turn. It is the easiest graphical interface for performing this operation that I have found, but it will only work with one discrete letter at a time. Ideally I would be able to enter a number of letters, have the program treat each one as a discrete letter and do the lot at once, replacing them all, regardless of their order or whether they appear together or separately in a word.

I downloaded and installed sed.

I'm having some teething problems with it. I tried your example code substituting David for Dave but sed couldn't find the document "names.txt" (saved to the Desktop.)

It looks like sed should do the job. I don't have time at the moment, but it looks as if I will have to work out what I am doing wrong and try again.

Thanks for the info though. sed looks intriguing.