John MacLerran wrote:

>specifically, the alpha function on mpe works on a string, but the grep
>command expects a file as its input. i'm not sure how to: 1) grep for alpha
>only characters (i'm thinking that something like [A-Z | a-z] is needed, but
>i'm not sure of the exact syntax), and 2)get grep to look at a string and
>evaluate just that string.  can anyone give some pointers?
>  
>

function isalpha {
  echo "$@" | grep -Eiqe '^[A-Z]+$'
}

testword="hello"
if isalpha $testword
then
  echo $testword is all alphabetic
else
  echo $testword is not all alphabetic
fi

storedbool=$(isalpha $testword; echo $?)
if [ $storedbool -eq 0 ]
then
  echo $testword is all alphabetic
else
  echo $testword is not all alphabetic
fi

testword="hello2"
if isalpha $testword
then
  echo $testword is all alphabetic
else
  echo $testword is not all alphabetic
fi

storedbool=$(isalpha $testword; echo $?)
if [ $storedbool -eq 0 ]
then
  echo $testword is all alphabetic
else
  echo $testword is not all alphabetic
fi

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