grep - How do I write a regex to get specific period of dates?

Question

I need to write a regex that returns all dates between May 1st and August 5, 2017 and does not match dates outside of this range. I have to use the grep command for this.

The dates in the file are given in this format YYYY-MM-DD

So far i got this code, but I dont know how i can grab the dates in August till the 5th without limiting it for the other months:

grep "2017[-/][05-08][-/]xx"

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

With GNU grep:

grep -e '2017-0[567]' -e '2017-08-0[1-5]' file

or

grep -E '2017-0[567]|2017-08-0[1-5]' file

or

grep -E '2017-0([567]|8-0[1-5])' file

---

See: The Stack Overflow Regular Expressions FAQ