Faster search filter: ICgrep

Well Filtered

Article from Issue 189/2016
Author(s):

One of the most common tasks when working on computers involves browsing texts for search patterns. Here, ICgrep offers a modern, parallel, and Unicode-enabled alternative to the classic grep.

Grep is arguably the most import text-browsing tool in Unix. Although its origins are not entirely clear, likely, the name for this tool developed from the command g/re/p (global, regular expression, print) from the Unix standard editor Ed.

In any case, grep searches entries line by line for certain formulated patterns, as regular expressions. Depending on the options used, the tool can display the matches, their location, number, and so on.

With today's texts, this concept is stretched to its limits in several respects. For example, modern systems no longer use the antiquated ASCII character set with its 128 characters or its larger, 256-character siblings such as Latin 1 or increasingly Unicode [1] (see the "Using Unicode Characters" box).

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