DW 1L "13 December 2024"

Table of contents

NAME

dw - find duplicate words

SYNOPSIS

dw [ --help ] [ --keep-lettercase ] [ --list-words ] [ --skip-punctuation ] [ --version ] [ --word-pattern '[initial][rest]' ] [ --word-pattern pattern-file ] < infile > outfile or infile1 infile2 infile3 ... > outfile

DESCRIPTION

dw is a handy tool for finding a common typographical error in documentation. If filters its standard input, or a list of files, printing on standard output only those words that appear two or more times in succession. Each word is prefixed by its filename and line number(s). For stdin, the filename is a dash.

A word starts with a letter or underscore, and is followed by zero or more letters, underscores, or digits. Letter case is ignored. Program options can modify that behavior.

OPTIONS

Command-line options may be abbreviated to any unique prefix, with one or two leading dashes, and their lettercase is not significant. Thus, -v, -V, and -VeRs are equivalent to --version.
--help or --?
Display a help message on stdout and exit.
--keep-lettercase
Preserve input lettercase, overriding the normal behavior of comparing words in a single lettercase.
--list-words
Print each recognized word on a separate line on stdout. Use that option to check the word recognition algorithm, as well as to extract text from files that contain punctuation and other material. The word list can often usefully be passed to other text-processing tools, such as aspell(1), grep(1), hunspell(1), ispell(1), sort(1), spell(1), and uniq(1).
--skip-punctuation
Collapse to a single space all sequences of characters that are neither whitespace nor word characters. Without that option, the input sally(sally)sally/sally does not produce a doubled word report; with it, three such instances are diagnosed.
--version
Print the program name, version, and copyright information on stdout and exit.
--word-pattern '[initial][rest]' or --word-pattern file
Specify an alternate pattern for recognizing the initial and following characters in words. The pattern is given in the following argument as two bracketed character sets, in which dashes represent ranges of consecutive characters. Alternatively, the pattern may be read from a user-supplied file, or from a file in the dw installation tree. In the latter case, it is found relative to the location of the executable program, in a directory named something like ../share/lib/dw/dw-2.02.

Pattern files may contain leading comment lines beginning with a sharp character (#): reading terminates after the first noncomment line.

For installed pattern files, a suffix .pat is automatically supplied, and the file contents are in Unicode UTF-8 encoding. Such files are named by the lowercase English name of the language, or by its ISO 639-1 alpha-2 code. Those codes are often identical to the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes that are used for Internet top-level domain names. Thus, --word-pattern spanish and --word-pattern es find equivalent pattern files, spanish.pat and es.pat, for that language.

The default pattern, similar to that for identifiers in many programming languages, and English-language text, is [A-Za-z_][A-Za-z_0-9]. That means an initial letter or underscore, followed by any number of letters, underscores, or digits. Whitespace around the bracketed patterns is ignored.

Any character in the pattern, except the character range dash, may be represented by an octal escape sequence of the form \ooo, \oo, or \o, where o is an octal digit, or by a hexadecimal escape sequence of the form \xhh, where h is a hexadecimal digit in 0-9a-f (ignoring lettercase), or by a literal escape sequence of the form \c where c is any single character, representing itself. The escape character checks are made in that order, so \x begins a hexadecimal sequence, rather than being a literal x.

Thus, the vowels aeiou may be represented by normal characters aeiou, by the literal sequence \a\e\i\o\u, by the octal sequence \141\145\151\157\165, by the hexadecimal sequence \x61\x65\x69\x6f\x75, or any mixture thereof.

BUGS AND FEATURES

dw assumes one-byte characters, as used in ASCII and the various ISO Latin-n character sets. Thus, it normally does not recognize words that contain multibyte characters, such as accented letters in Unicode UTF-8 encoding. Neverthless, if you put multibyte characters into the --word-pattern value, they will be treated as word constituents, but so will any other characters that have the same leading bytes. While not strictly correct, for many languages, most words are correctly identified, because the UTF-8 encodings group accented letters together.

Here are examples of additional characters needed in word patterns (some glyphs may be lost due to output device and/or font limitations). All of them are recognized by dw, with language names in lowercase:

Arabic (ar)
numerous letters and letter variants
Danish (da)
\['E]\[AE]\[/O]\[oA] \['e]\[ae]\[/o]\[oa]
default
[A-Za-z_][A-Za-z_0-9]
Dutch (nl)
none normally needed, but sometimes, ligatures \[IJ] \[ij]
English (en)
none normally needed, but rarely, \[AE]\[:I]\[OE] \[ae]\[:i]\[oe]
Finnish (fi)
\['E]\[oA]\[:A]\[:O]\[vS]\[vZ] \['e]\[oa]\[:a]\[:o]\[vs]\[vz]
French (fr)
\[^A]\[:A]\['E]\[`E]\[^E]\[:E]\[,C]\[^I]\[:I]\[^O]\[:O]\[^U]\[:U]\[:Y] \[AE]\[OE] \[^a]\[:a]\['e]\[`e]\[^e]\[:e]\[,c]\[^i]\[:i]\[^o]\[:o]\[^u]\[:u]\[:y] \[ae]\[oe]
German (de)
\[:A]\[:O]\[:U] \[:a]\[:o]\[:u] \[ss]
Greek (el)
[24 Greek letters, in each case]
Hebrew (he)
22 letters in one case, with 5 word-ending variants, plus apostrophe
Hungarian (hu)
\['A]\['E]\['I]\['O]\['U]\[:O]\[:U] \['a]\['e]\['i]\['o]\['u]\[:o]\[:u], plus long double acute accent on O U o u
Icelandic (is)
\['A]\[-D]\['E]\['O]\['U]\['Y]\[TP]\[:O] \['a]\[Sd]\['e]\['o]\['u]\['y]\[Tp]\[:o]
Irish (ga)
\['A]\['E]\['I]\['O]\['U] \['a]\['e]\['i]\['o]\['u]
Italian (it)
\['E]\[`E]\['I]\[`I]\[^I]\['O]\[`O]\['U]\[`U] \['e]\[`e]\['i]\[`i]\[^i]\['o]\[`o]\['u]\[`u]
Latin-1
all accented letters from ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) encoding
Lisp
-%$:
Maltese (mt)
four accented letters in two cases, plus apostrophe
Norwegian (no)
\[^A]\['E]\[`E]\[^E]\['O]\[`O]\[^O]\[AE]\[/O]\[oA] \[^a]\['e]\[`e]\[^e]\['o]\[`o]\[^o]\[ae]\[/o]\[oa]
Polish (pl)
acute accent on C N O S Z c n o s z, ogonek on A E a e, overdot on Z z, and stroke on L l
Portuguese (pt)
\['A]\[^A]\[~A]\[,C]\['E]\[^E]\['I]\['O]\[^O]\[~O]\['U] \['a]\[^a]\[~a]\[,c]\['e]\[^e]\['i]\['o]\[^o]\[~o]\['u]
Russian (ru)
Cyrillic alphabet
Scots (sc)
none needed
Spanish (es)
\['A]\['E]\['I]\['O]\['U]\[~N] \['a]\['e]\['i]\['o]\['u]\[~n]
Swahili (sw)
'?
Swedish (se or sv)
\['E]\[oA]\[:A]\[:O] \['e]\[oa]\[:a]\[:o]
Welsh (cy)
' \['A]\[`A]\[^A]\[:A]\['E]\[`E]\[^E]\[:E]\['I]\[`I]\[^I]\[:I]\['O]\[`O]\[^O]\[:O]\['U]\[`U]\[^U]\[:U] \['a]\[`a]\[^a]\[:a]\['e]\[`e]\[^e]\[:e]\['i]\[`i]\[^i]\[:i]\['o]\[`o]\[^o]\[:o]\['u]\[`u]\[^u]\[:u]

For languages that use characters outside the Latin-alphabet family, the patterns include the dw default pattern, because mixed-with-English texts are common.

The languages above include two that are written from right to left (Arabic and Hebrew, each with distinctive non-Latin scripts).

AUTHOR 

Nelson H. F. Beebe
University of Utah
Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB
155 S 1400 E RM 233
Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090
USA
WWW URL: https://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe
Tel: +1 801 581 5254
Email: beebe@math.utah.edu, beebe@acm.org, beebe@computer.org