LEXTRACT.EXE

Version 1.0a of June 2002
COPYRIGHT (C) 1997-2002 Norbert H. Doerry

1. Description

LEXTRACT.EXE is a utility for extracting records from an ASCII flat file based on a search string. Only those records in the input file which have a match with the search string are printed in the output file. If a starting column is specified, a match means that the search string is identical to the string starting in the specified column (number of characters from the start) of each record.
If a starting column is not specified, then a match means the search string can be found anywhere in the record. The comparisons are by default case sensitive, but can be specified to be case insensitive.

Records may either have a fixed length, or may be newline delimited. If a fixed length is not specified, then the records are assumed to be newline delimited.

2. Syntax

LEXTRACT.EXE  infile -sXXX -cXX -i -rXX -oOutfile -?

   where

   infile   = Name of input ascii flat file
              if omitted, data is taken from stdin
   -sXXX    = XXX is the search string
   -cXX     = XX is the column to look for the search string,
              if omitted, searches the entire record (line)
   -i       = ignore case of search string
   -rXX     = record length, including terminating newline if present
              if omitted, assumes lines are terminated with newlines
   Outfile  = Name of ascii output file
              if omitted, output is written to stdout 
   -?         Prints Syntax, then exits.

3. Comments

• If a record length is not specified, then assumes lines are terminated with hard returns (newlines). The maximum length of a line (if not specified) is 2047 characters.
• If the search string contains spaces, it must be delimited with quotation marks ""
• If the search string contains a quotation mark, it must be preceded with a forward slash \
• An unadvertised command option, -d will display all of the command line arguments as interpreted by the program.
• The column entry assumes the first column is = 1.
• newlines are treated as one character, even if the binary representation shows two characters.

4. Examples

       lextract test1.txt -saaa -c4 -otest1out.txt

       lextract test1.txt -saaa -c4 -i -otestiout.txt