Hi,
I tried to replace three letters with three letters by awk using the sub-routine. I assumed that my regular expression does mean the following: match if three letters of any letter of alphabet occurs anywhere in input $ echo AbC | awk '{sub(/[[:alpha:]]{3}/,"cBa"); print;}' AbC As you can see the result was unexpected. When I try doing it for at least one letter, it works: $ echo AbC | awk '{sub(/[[:alpha:]]+/,"cBa"); print;}' cBa Same problem without macro: $ echo AbC | awk '{sub(/[A-Za-z]{3}/,"cBa"); print;}' AbC $ echo AbC | awk '{sub(/[A-Za-z]+/,"cBa"); print;}' cBa I thought that it might have something to do with the curly braces. But escaping them doesn't do the trick. What am I doing wrong? Or is awk buggy? Regards, kaltheat _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"