[SOLVED] regex exclude lines with first word ending in colon

Issue

I'm trying to strip out lines that have the format

word: bla bla
anotherword: bla bla

but I want to keep

this example: bla bla

I tried this: cat "myfile" | grep -v "\w: "

but that removes all lines with any word: combination

if I do this cat "myfile" | grep -v "^\w: "

to say, only lines where the pattern is at the beginning, it doesn't exclude any of the lines

I also tried cat "myfile" | sed '/^\w:/d' but that didn't work either

if I try it with a specific word like cat "myfile" | sed '/^title:/d'

that works the way its supposed to.

What am I doing wrong?

Solution

You may use

grep -vE '^[_[:alnum:]]+:' file

It matches any lines but (due to -v option) those that

• ^ - start with
• [_[:alnum:]]+ - 1 or more alphanumeric or _ chars
• : - a colon.

Note that \w, which may be replaced with [_[:alnum:]] if supported, just matches a single word character.

Answered By - Wiktor Stribiżew