The grep statement

Synopsis

    grep(<regular expression>) {
      < statements that execute for each line matching expression >
    }

or

    grep(<regular expression>)

Behavior

The grep statement is an internal convenience function that processes the input file line by line for each line matching a given regular expression.

In the first form, the body is executed for each line in the input file that matches and an implicit variable line is defined. The body can execute regular commands using exec or it can use native Groovy / Java commands to process the data. An implicit variable out is defined as an output stream that can write to the current output file, making it convenient to use grep to filter and process lines and write extracted data to the output file.

In the second form grep works very much like the command line grep with both the input and output file taken from the input and output variables. In this case, all matching lines from the input are written to the output.

Examples

Remove lines containing INDEL from a file

grep(".*") {
  if(line.indexOf("INDEL") < 0)
    out << line
}

Create output file containing only INDELS from input file

grep("INDEL")