Re: Fwd: playing with IFS

If you are capturing the output of grep in a variable it won't do any
coloring at all unless you force it with --color=always. I would normally
leave it off when operating grep programmatically... not sure why you'd
want to capture it.

On Mon, Apr 13, 2026 at 12:50 PM Ray Andrews <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> On 2026-04-13 08:53, Mark J. Reed wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2026 at 10:47 PM dana <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> i don't see the difference
>>
> The first one tries to put expansion flags in {} instead of (). That's
> nothing to do with spaces, Ray. It's always ${(flags)...} - curlies on
> the outside, parens on the inside.
>
> I know it.  A simple typo.  Cost me hours trying to figure out what was
> wrong :(  Just a lazy eye.
>
> .
> As for this:
>
>      sed -r 's/(\x1b\[K[:-]\x1b\[m\x1b\[K)[[:space:]]*/\1 /g'
>
> Even if you stick with sed you might prefer an ANSI string version of the
> command:
>
>      $'s/(\e\\[K[:-]\e\\[m\e\\[K)[ \t]*/\\1 /g'
>
> What an improvement!  That $' ' quoting ... still don't understand it or
> use it.  This is all mods to grep colorizations, which are so overloaded
> with superfluous codes -- but I'm told that grep is extra careful due to
> the fact that some terminals might need them.  Still, I'd take native zsh
> code if it would work -- no pipes, no '<<<', no '$()'.  All this sed stuff
> -- good example of 'write only' code -- I know what it means when I write
> it, but an hour later it's gibberish.
>
> BTW point of it is to remove leading spaces from grep lines.  Quite nice.
>
>
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1175Pjfx0RTjs5vbA9yqx62eOwg-4jnxW/view?usp=sharing
>
>

-- 
Mark J. Reed <[email protected]>