Agrep

  • Udi Manber
  • Sun Wu
Initial release1988; 36 years ago (1988)Stable release
3.41.5
Repository
  • github.com/Wikinaut/agrep Edit this at Wikidata
Written inCOperating system
  • Unix-like
  • OS/2
  • DOS
  • Microsoft Windows
TypePattern matchingLicenseISC open source licenseWebsitewww.tgries.de/agrep

agrep (approximate grep) is an open-source approximate string matching program, developed by Udi Manber and Sun Wu between 1988 and 1991,[1] for use with the Unix operating system. It was later ported to OS/2, DOS, and Windows.

It selects the best-suited algorithm for the current query from a variety of the known fastest (built-in) string searching algorithms, including Manber and Wu's bitap algorithm based on Levenshtein distances.

agrep is also the search engine in the indexer program GLIMPSE. agrep is under a free ISC License.[2]

Alternative implementations

A more recent agrep is the command-line tool provided with the TRE regular expression library. TRE agrep is more powerful than Wu-Manber agrep since it allows weights and total costs to be assigned separately to individual groups in the pattern. It can also handle Unicode.[3] Unlike Wu-Manber agrep, TRE agrep is licensed under a 2-clause BSD-like license.

FREJ (Fuzzy Regular Expressions for Java) open-source library provides command-line interface which could be used in the way similar to agrep. Unlike agrep or TRE it could be used for constructing complex substitutions for matched text.[4] However its syntax and matching abilities differs significantly from ones of ordinary regular expressions.

See also

References

  1. ^ Wu, Sun; Manber, Udi (20–24 January 1992). Agrep -- a fast approximate pattern-matching tool. 1992 Winter USENIX Conference. San Francisco, California. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.89.5424.
  2. ^ WebGlimpse, Glimpse and also AGREP license since 18.09.2014 (ISC License).
  3. ^ "TRE - TRE regexp matching package - Features".
  4. ^ "FREJ - Fuzzy Regular Expressions for Java - Guide and Examples".

External links

  • Wu-Manber agrep
    • AGREP home page
    • For Unix (To compile under OSX 10.8, add -Wno-return-type to the CFLAGs = -O line in the Makefile)
  • See also
    • TRE regexp matching package
    • cgrep a defunct command line approximate string matching tool
    • nrgrep a command line approximate string matching tool
    • agrep as implemented in R