5.5 Character Classes and Bracket Expressions

A bracket expression is a list of characters enclosed by ‘[’ and ‘]’. It matches any single character in that list; if the first character of the list is the caret ‘^’, then it matches any character not in the list. For example, the following command replaces the strings ‘gray’ or ‘grey’ with ‘blue’:

sed  's/gr[ae]y/blue/'

Bracket expressions can be used in both basic and extended regular expressions (that is, with or without the -E/-r options).

Within a bracket expression, a range expression consists of two characters separated by a hyphen. It matches any single character that sorts between the two characters, inclusive. In the default C locale, the sorting sequence is the native character order; for example, ‘[a-d]’ is equivalent to ‘[abcd]’.

Finally, certain named classes of characters are predefined within bracket expressions, as follows.

These named classes must be used inside brackets themselves. Correct usage:

$ echo 1 | sed 's/[[:digit:]]/X/'
X

Incorrect usage is rejected by newer sed versions. Older versions accepted it but treated it as a single bracket expression (which is equivalent to ‘[dgit:]’, that is, only the characters d/g/i/t/:):

# current GNU sed versions - incorrect usage rejected
$ echo 1 | sed 's/[:digit:]/X/'
sed: character class syntax is [[:space:]], not [:space:]

# older GNU sed versions
$ echo 1 | sed 's/[:digit:]/X/'
1

‘[:alnum:]’

Alphanumeric characters: ‘[:alpha:]’ and ‘[:digit:]’; in the ‘C’ locale and ASCII character encoding, this is the same as ‘[0-9A-Za-z]’.

‘[:alpha:]’

Alphabetic characters: ‘[:lower:]’ and ‘[:upper:]’; in the ‘C’ locale and ASCII character encoding, this is the same as ‘[A-Za-z]’.

‘[:blank:]’

Blank characters: space and tab.

‘[:cntrl:]’

Control characters. In ASCII, these characters have octal codes 000 through 037, and 177 (DEL). In other character sets, these are the equivalent characters, if any.

‘[:digit:]’

Digits: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9.

‘[:graph:]’

Graphical characters: ‘[:alnum:]’ and ‘[:punct:]’.

‘[:lower:]’

Lower-case letters; in the ‘C’ locale and ASCII character encoding, this is a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z.

‘[:print:]’

Printable characters: ‘[:alnum:]’, ‘[:punct:]’, and space.

‘[:punct:]’

Punctuation characters; in the ‘C’ locale and ASCII character encoding, this is ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~.

‘[:space:]’

Space characters: in the ‘C’ locale, this is tab, newline, vertical tab, form feed, carriage return, and space.

‘[:upper:]’

Upper-case letters: in the ‘C’ locale and ASCII character encoding, this is A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z.

‘[:xdigit:]’

Hexadecimal digits: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F a b c d e f.

Note that the brackets in these class names are part of the symbolic names, and must be included in addition to the brackets delimiting the bracket expression.

Most meta-characters lose their special meaning inside bracket expressions:

‘]’

ends the bracket expression if it’s not the first list item. So, if you want to make the ‘]’ character a list item, you must put it first.

‘-’

represents the range if it’s not first or last in a list or the ending point of a range.

‘^’

represents the characters not in the list. If you want to make the ‘^’ character a list item, place it anywhere but first.

TODO: incorporate this paragraph (copied verbatim from BRE section).

The characters $, *, ., [, and \ are normally not special within list. For example, [\*] matches either ‘\’ or ‘*’, because the \ is not special here. However, strings like [.ch.], [=a=], and [:space:] are special within list and represent collating symbols, equivalence classes, and character classes, respectively, and [ is therefore special within list when it is followed by ., =, or :. Also, when not in POSIXLY_CORRECT mode, special escapes like \n and \t are recognized within list. See Escape Sequences - specifying special characters.

‘[.’

represents the open collating symbol.

‘.]’

represents the close collating symbol.

‘[=’

represents the open equivalence class.

‘=]’

represents the close equivalence class.

‘[:’

represents the open character class symbol, and should be followed by a valid character class name.

‘:]’

represents the close character class symbol.