I wish Awk had capture groups. It would fit in so well with typical Awk one-liners to be able to say:

    awk '/foo=([0-9]+)/ { print $1 }'

although I suppose the syntax would have to be different since $1 has a meaning already.

Yes, gawk has a function that returns capture groups, but it's a bit verbose for one-liners. Instead I switch to Perl:

    perl -nE 'if (/foo=([0-9]+)/) { say $1 }'

But I wish I could just use Awk.

forinti

I wish grep had capture groups so I could do things like

    grep "\((\d+)\)" -print "$1" file.txt

defrost

ripgrep is a modern faster grep in Rust, some cons, many pros.

It'll do capture groups with search | replace

    # remove square brackets that surround digit characters
    $ echo '[52] apples [and] [31] mangoes' | rg '\[(\d+)]' -r '$1'
    52 apples [and] 31 mangoes

asicsp

Pleasantly surprised to see an example from my ebook :)

Add `-o` option to get only the digits:

    $ echo '[52] apples [and] [31] mangoes' | rg -o '\[(\d+)]' -r '$1'
    52
    31

defrost

Congratulations (?) for making the top five google results for "ripgrep capture groups" [1].

I cite sources way more often than not, this time I got lazy after dithering over whether to go with the definitive ripgrep source page [2] or a decent looking third party(?) tutorial .. pressed for time I did neither.

[1] https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_gnugrep_ripgrep/ripgr...

[2] https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep