xpo

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Highlight strings by regular expressions in the terminal

What is xpo?

Remember staring at large log files and trying to find all IP addresses in a wall of text? It's not only difficult to parse such files visually, it's also difficult to find if they are all the same or if they are changing.

xpo solves this problem by colorizing regexp matches while making sure same matches always have the same color and similar matches have similar colors. If 127.0.0.1 is green-ish, 127.0.0.2 ought to be close enough.

Colors are assigned kind-of arbitrarily, but it's also possible to assign explicit colors to matched strings.

Color space: 6 × 6 × 6 cube (216 colors): 16 + 36 × r + 6 × g + b (0 ≤ r, g, b ≤ 5)

Installation on MacOS

$ brew tap ghoseb/xpo
$ brew install xpo
$ xpo --help # verify installation

Building from source

# you'll need the Go toolchain to compile the project
$ brew install go

# cd src/xpo
$ make build

# move the binary from bin to a suitable location
$ mv bin/xpo ~/bin/

Usage

# highlight any `ERR`, `WARN` or `INFO` in the log file
$ cat logfile | xpo -r "ERR|WARN|INFO" | less -R

# highlight IP addresses and HTTP methods
$ cat logfile | xpo -r "^((25[0-5]|(2[0-4]|1\d|[1-9]|)\d)\.?\b){4}|GET|POST" | less -R

# use specific colors using -e
# specified as "r,g,b:string" where (0 ≤ r, g, b ≤ 5)
# the -e option can be used multiple times
$ cat logfile | xpo -r "^((25[0-5]|(2[0-4]|1\d|[1-9]|)\d)\.?\b){4}|GET|POST" -e "0,5,0:GET" -e "5,0,0:POST" | less -R

# if we are on a light background, -l may be used to exclude light colors
$ cat logfile | xpo -r "ERR|WARN|INFO" -l | less -R

Useful regular expressions

• IPv4 - ((25[0-5]|(2[0-4]|1\d|[1-9]|)\d)\.?\b){4}
• UUIDv4 - \b[a-f0-9]{8}-[a-f0-9]{4}-[a-f0-9]{4}-[a-f0-9]{4}-[a-f0-9]{12}\b

Credits

• Steve Losh for the idea and wonderful implementation in Common Lisp

License

xpo is released under the MIT license. See LICENSE.txt