How to search for spaces?

[luckman212]

Sorry for this rudimentary question, but I am wondering if this is correct to search for "some pattern" (words separated by a space):

rg 'some pattern'

because my instinct was to escape the space, like this

rg 'some\ pattern'

which results in

regex parse error:
    some\ pattern
        ^^
error: unrecognized escape sequence

similarly, how to search for a line ending with 2 spaces?

rg '  $'

not?

rg '\ \ $'

any way to invoke rg in a way that the syntax is more aligned with standard unix grep/sed etc?
thank you

[BurntSushi]

Why are you trying to escape spaces? Literal spaces work just fine. What isn't working about them?

more aligned with standard unix grep/sed etc

POSIX support is a non-goal. If you want POSIX then use POSIX compatible tooling.

[luckman212]

Ok @BurntSushi thank you. Makes sense. Sorry for the uninformed question.

I guess I picked up a habit of escaping spaces somewhere along my way, maybe when working with unquoted strings ... rg foo\ bar instead of rg 'foo bar' but I understand that is apples & oranges

[BurntSushi]

Well, rg foo\ bar works. It's just rg 'foo\ bar' that doesn't work.

FWIW, it's likely that escaping spaces will ultimately be allowed. It's just that it's a property of the underlying regex engine, not ripgrep.

[gvanem]

I have a similar issue. Searching for fprintf( causes a parse error (error: unclosed group).

I'd like to search w/o any regexp-syntax completely. But I fail to see there is one.

[BurntSushi]

That's what the -F/--fixed-strings flag is for. It's been standard in grep tooling for decades:

       -F, --fixed-strings
           Treat the pattern as a literal string instead of a regular expression. When this flag is used,
           special regular expression meta characters such as .(){}*+ do not need to be escaped.

[BurntSushi]

And to be clear, that isn't too similar to this issue. This issue is about being able to escape something that doesn't actually need escaping. Your issue is the opposite: you're trying to search for a literal ( without escaping it, despite the fact that ( is a regex meta character.

[gvanem]

@BurntSushi Excellent! I did not know about this -F option.

[luckman212]

@gvanem You can use either of these...

rg --fixed-strings 'fprintf('

or

rg 'fprintf\('

[BurntSushi]

Note that -F is the abbreviated form of --fixed-strings.