How to truncate long matching lines returned by gr

Question

I want to run ack or grep on HTML files that often have very long lines. I don't want to see very long lines that wrap repeatedly. But I do want to see just that portion of a long line that surrounds a string that matches the regular expression. How can I get this using any combination of Unix tools?

Answer 1

cut -c 1-100

gets characters from 1 to 100.

Answer 2

Pipe your results thru cut. I'm also considering adding a --cut switch so you could say --cut=80 and only get 80 columns.

Answer 3

You could use less as a pager for ack and chop long lines: ack --pager="less -S" This retains the long line but leaves it on one line instead of wrapping. To see more of the line, scroll left/right in less with the arrow keys.

I have the following alias setup for ack to do this:

alias ick='ack -i --pager="less -R -S"' 

Answer 4

You could use the grep option -o, possibly in combination with changing your pattern to ".{0,10}<original pattern>.{0,10}" in order to see some context around it:

       -o, --only-matching
              Show only the part of a matching line that matches PATTERN.

..or -c:

       -c, --count
              Suppress normal output; instead print a count of matching  lines
              for  each  input  file.  With the -v, --invert-match option (see
              below), count non-matching lines.

Answer 5

Taken from: http://www.topbug.net/blog/2016/08/18/truncate-long-matching-lines-of-grep-a-solution-that-preserves-color/

The suggested approach ".{0,10}<original pattern>.{0,10}" is perfectly good except for that the highlighting color is often messed up. I've created a script with a similar output but the color is also preserved:

#!/bin/bash

# Usage:
#   grepl PATTERN [FILE]

# how many characters around the searching keyword should be shown?
context_length=10

# What is the length of the control character for the color before and after the
# matching string?
# This is mostly determined by the environmental variable GREP_COLORS.
control_length_before=$(($(echo a | grep --color=always a | cut -d a -f '1' | wc -c)-1))
control_length_after=$(($(echo a | grep --color=always a | cut -d a -f '2' | wc -c)-1))

grep -E --color=always "$1" $2 |
grep --color=none -oE \
    ".{0,$(($control_length_before + $context_length))}$1.{0,$(($control_length_after + $context_length))}"

Assuming the script is saved as grepl, then grepl pattern file_with_long_lines should display the matching lines but with only 10 characters around the matching string.