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I'm looking to match any string that contains a [DEBUG] statement and that eventually will have a ": " string following it. If there are several ": " strings following it, I want to match the first. The idea is to then color both the [DEBUG] statement and what's next to the first ": ".

An example would be:

  [thread1] [DEBUG] [2017.03.12 23:22:12] com.abc.def.Xyz: some log message: some more specific info.

should be translated into:

  [thread1] ${RED}[DEBUG]${DEFAULT} [2017.03.12 23:22:12] com.abc.def.Xyz: ${RED}some log message.${DEFAULT}

For that, I thought the following sed replace string would suffice, but it doesn't:

sed -r "s/(\[DEBUG\])([^:]*: )(.*)$/${RED}\1${DEFAULT}\2${RED}\3{$DEFAULT}/"

I've lost hours around this but unfortunately it doesn't match the shown above string. Any clues on why?

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  • And what happens to the messages after the 2nd ":". You are showing them deleted whereas you are talking that only the 1st message after ":" is colored, which implies that the 2nd onwards would be left as is. There is an ambiguity here. Commented Apr 15, 2017 at 7:55

1 Answer 1

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You are trying to match, for group 2, anything except a : up to a :, but there are colons in the time, so you don't match. You can try replacing the [^:] with . and likely get the same results, unless you have a : somewhere else in the line, then it will match up until the last occurrence of that string.

Perhaps a better pattern, though, is

sed -r 's/(\[DEBUG])( \[[[:digit:].: ]*] [^:]*: )(.*)/${RED}\1${DEFAULT}\2${RED}\3${DEFAULT}/'
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  • There are other :'s but they aren't followed by a space, so they should be discarded by the regexp engine. Or am I wrong here? Commented Apr 14, 2017 at 14:41
  • Consider this case: echo a:b: xyz | sed 's/[^:]: /worked/' where it doesn't get confused by having other :s. Commented Apr 14, 2017 at 14:43
  • @devouredelysium Right, but you're trying to anchor it so that it's immediately following the DEBUG block, and there is no such sequence of non-colon characters then a colon space immediately after the [DEBUG] Commented Apr 14, 2017 at 14:49
  • Ah, I get your point. I was looking at [^:] as an alternative to the non-greedy operator that sed does not provide.. Commented Apr 14, 2017 at 14:55
  • s/(\[DEBUG])( \[[[:digit:].: ]*] [^:]*: )(.*) should have been s/(\[DEBUG])( \[[[:digit:].: ]*] [^:]*: )([^:]*) since only the first log message is to be colored. Commented Apr 15, 2017 at 7:52

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