[SOLVED] grep using wildcard .* but ignore whitespaces

Issue

I need to find all instances of &var[0] in a C++ code. Using grep -r "&.*\[0\]" . found those but also int& aaa = bbb[0];. How to make grep wildcard .* to avoid whitespaces at all?

Solution

What about "&\w*\[0\]"? \w identifies "word characters", ie [A-Za-z_], so it should do what you're looking for.

EDIT: Elevating this excellent point from the comments:

\w is nonstandard, so it'd be safer to replace it with something like [[:alnum:]_]

Answered By - Jon Kiparsky

Answer Checked By - Willingham (WPSolving Volunteer)