Improve your content searching/filtering workflow productivity with regexp-it-cli

Involve regular expressions to solve different kind of tasks regarding text content

Let me introduce a nodejs library called regexp-it-cli - cli tool that provides content searching/filtering functionality by regular expressions. It has plenty of features, some of them will be highlighted in this post.

I am going to demonstrate some use cases where this tool would be applicable.

Regexp playground

You can experiment with regular expression by passing some content as a source and executing your trial regular over it. For example, display only matched parts for specified regexp:

Show some content in slide mode

Have you ever wanted a find functionality without dealing with manually movement handling to the next match but automatically see the next matches with some interval? Slide mode to the rescue! Use the --slide-mode option optionally providing also --slide-delay specifying a delay in seconds you'd like:

Filtering content between sections

You can use regexp in a source only after/before specified --after-regexp and --before-regexp:

Displaying first and last match

Display only first/last match by providing the --only-first-match / --only-last-match flag

$ regexp-it-cli --url "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/inversify/InversifyJS/master/src/container/container.ts" --regexp "throw.*" -m -q --only-first-match

Using predefined patterns

Use predefined patterns instead of specifying --regexp yourself by using --regexp-pattern option.

regexp-it-cli --file "samples/misc.txt" --regexp-pattern "urlLine" -e -m -q

Specify starting/ending line from a source to be used as a content

Apply filter to content that is going to be used a source for a regular expression by using the --starting-line-number, --ending-line-number options.