LESSON 384 OF 410 · PROJECTS: COMMAND-LINE TOOLS

CLI Tool: grep v4 — Whole Word Match in JavaScript

Practice

Build the -w flag of the Unix grep command. Given a list of lines and a search pattern (a single word made of letters, digits, and underscores), return all lines that contain pattern as a WHOLE word — i.e. the characters immediately before and after the match must NOT be word characters (letters, digits, or underscores). The match is case-sensitive.

Return the matching lines joined by newline characters (\n).

Function signature:

grepWord(lines, pattern)

Example:

Input:
pattern = "cat"
lines = ["cat sat", "concat", "the cat", "category"]

Output: "cat sat\nthe cat"

When printed:
cat sat
the cat

Notice that "concat" is rejected because cat is preceded by the word character n (con|cat), and "category" is rejected because cat is followed by the word character e.

A line may contain the pattern more than once. It is selected if at least one occurrence is a whole word: with pattern "cat", the line "concat cat" is selected because of its second cat. The lines contain only ASCII characters.

If no lines match, return the empty string "".

JavaScript's RegExp supports the \b word boundary anchor. Build the regex once outside the loop, then use regex.test(line).

let regex = new RegExp("\\b" + pattern + "\\b");
// per line: if (regex.test(line)) keep

The full solution:

class Solution {
    grepWord(lines, pattern) {
        let result = [];
        let regex = new RegExp("\\b" + pattern + "\\b");
        for (let i = 0; i < lines.length; i++) {
            if (regex.test(lines[i])) {
                result.push(lines[i]);
            }
        }
        return result.join("\n");
    }
}

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CLI Tool: grep v4 — Whole Word Match in JavaScript

Grep V4 in JavaScript