To grepTo grep is to search a text for a string or regular expression pattern of characters.
Return to Glossary. is to search a text for a stringA string is a series of characters (symbols, letters or numbers) of finite length.
Strings are used to generate a collocation, concordance, co-occurrence, or any other type of textual analysis in which locating a word fragment, word, phrase, sentence and so on is important.
For more information, see the Wikipedia.
Return to Glossary. or regular expressionA regular expression, sometimes called regex, is an advanced method of searching text using formal language, commonly employed by programming languages. The TAPoR toolset frequently refers to regular expressions as 'patterns'.
Using regular expressions allows one to expand a search beyond a simple string of characters ('cat'). Instead, one may search for such instances as all words including 'cat' ('catalogue', 'concatenate'), or all words beginning with 'c' and ending in 't'. This method therefore allows one to search for a pattern within a text with a high degree of precision and flexibility.
Please note that TAPoR also supports Unix style searching, a specific form of regular expression used by the Unix operating system.
For more information, please see the Wikipedia entry for regular expressions. To learn regular expressions, please see the Open Directory's resource list.
Return to Glossary.patternIn text analysis, a pattern is a string of characters (such as a word or phrase) or regular expression to be searched for within the source text.
Return to Glossary. of characters.