ter - Text Expression Runner

ter is a cli to run text expressions and perform basic text operations such as filtering, ignoring and replacing on the command line. There are many great tools that do this job. But most other tools have one in common: They are hard to memorize if you dont use them regularly. ter tries to solve this issue by providing a super simple cli & expression language which can be easily memorized and is well documented.

Quickstart

$ ter filter 'equals "foobar"' -m word				# matches all occurences `foobar` in the text
$ ter filter 'length 20'							# matches all lines with 20 chars
$ ter ignore 'numeric or special'					# ignores all lines which contain only numbers and special chars
$ ter replace 'numeric and length 5' 12345 -m word	# replaces all 5 digit numbers with `12345`

Common tasks where ter excels grep in readability

When to use other tools

As said earlier: ter is no direct competitor to grep, awk, etc.! If you find yourself reaching the limits of the text expression language, you probably want to use more advanced tools.

Installing

At the moment ter can be installed only via cargo using:

$ cargo install ter

Documentation

There are the following global options:

• -m / --mode, sets the operation mode, can be either line or word, defaults to line

And there are the following global flags:

• -f / --first`, print only the first match if available
• -l / --last`, print only the last match if available
• --skip n, skip the first n matches
• --limit n, show at most n matches

ter filter [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <EXPRESSION> [FILE]
ter ignore [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <EXPRESSION> [FILE]
ter replace [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] <EXPRESSION> <REPLACEMENT> [FILE]

If no file is provided ter tries to read from stdin.

Examples

$ docker ps | ter filter 'alphanumeric and length 12' -m word # prints all docker container ids

The Text Expression Language

This is a super simple format of writing readable and easy to memorize text processing expressions - there are many great and far more advanced languages and tools to process text on the commandline out there but all of them have one problem in common - they're unreadable and hard to memorize if not used often.

The Text Expression Languages provides only 9 Attributes to query by. These attributes indicate the format of a string which gets tested against it.

Currently there are only two binary logical operations: and and or

Attributes can be concattenated by logical operators.

Examples

starts "FOO" and ends "BAR"
contains "@" and contains ".com"
length 5 and length 10
numeric and length 8

Limitations

This Syntax might not cover all use cases. It's not meant to do that. If you find yourself reaching the limits of this language you might want to use more advanced tools (such as awk, grep, sed..)

The code for the language itself lives in a seperate repository.