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macOS How do I extract all words which use a certain character from a text file ?

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XPcentric

macrumors 6502
Original poster
I want to extract all words which have a character (ie. $) from a text. Is there a simple command in Terminal or even text editors ? Thanks!
 
Most text editors have a "find" function where you can search for anything containing any number of letters.
 
Yes but I want to extract all of the different words which include that character. When the file is long, is hard to copy-paste all words one by one. There must be a Unix command which I'm searching now, before anyone post an answer.
 
Assuming you are in the correct directory containing the file, the file is called file.txt and you want the list of words in output.txt then this will do it (without correcting for caps/non-caps). We are searching for c. If you want to search for $ you might well have to escape it

Code: 
cat file.txt | tr -d '[:punct:]' | tr ' ' '\n' | grep c | sort | uniq > output.txt
 
Thank you so much, you saved me good amount of searching. I finally had to replace the special character to do the task quicker. I tried to escape it with single and double quotes but it didn't work.
 
XPcentric said:
Thank you so much, you saved me good amount of searching. I finally had to replace the special character to do the task quicker. I tried to escape it with single and double quotes but it didn't work.
Click to expand...

$ is a special character in regular expressions (end of line). I generally escape it like this \[\$]. The backslashes are probably overkill.

B
 
This time I was looking for @ and $. I assign these characters to tasks, its nothing to do with their usual connotation.
 
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