How do I search for the $ character?

[OM2]

OK... so this isn't actually a PHP coding answer

But... I'm guessing the answer that works for PHP, will work for my purpose

 

Sometimes, I need to search for text containing special characters

In this instance, I'm trying to use Wingrep to search for all files that contains '$myVariable'

 

Is there a standard way of escaping the meaning of $?

 

Thanks in advance

 

 

OM

 

[cssfreakie]

inside double quotes and a heredoc a backslash would suffice

for instance:

 

echo "lalala this \$variable will not work";

 

inside single quotes $ has no meaning

[JAY6390]

Since this is in the regex section I'm guessing it's related to regexes

The answer is still the backslash

\$ will escape a $, however you will also need to escape the \ in a string so it would actually be "/\\$/" for example

[OM2]

that didn't quite work - my guess was that it would do

 

i found the solution anyway - there's an option where u can choose to 'not us' regular expressions - i can now search for strings that have $ in

 

thanks for the reply - much appreciated

[OM2]

Since this is in the regex section I'm guessing it's related to regexes

The answer is still the backslash

\$ will escape a $, however you will also need to escape the \ in a string so it would actually be "/\\$/" for example

i tried this - didn't work

though i think i must be doing something wrong

the use of searches and regular expressions should be the same as used for php or perl (i assumed - hence i asked my question here)

thanks

[cags]

It's almost certainly to do with escaping of the string. Depending on how you are running the search you probably just need more slashes. In pure regex \$ will match a dollar sign. But if you are using that in a command line tool, you likely have to escape the slash for that too. You can easily end up with strings requiring 4 slashes in order to escape them correctly to allow the correct number to make it through to the actual regex parser.

[salathe]

though i think i must be doing something wrong

 

You must be. Wingrep happily searches for literal dollar characters with \$ 

[OM2]

using wingrep

ok... my bad... it works   

i thought i had tried that before - obviously not

thanks a lot