in reply to highlighting match found

Couldn't you just output the matched lines, with line numbers, to a separate file?

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Re^2: highlighting match found
by auto_w (Novice) on Dec 17, 2011 at 21:33 UTC

    i could but there are still a number of tags which makes it hard to read and pinpoint what i'm looking for

      You could also cheat and make your output file be HTML, which would allow for easy coloring and styling of the text any way you want.

      THIS IS A MATCH!

      <font color="#CC0000"><b>THIS IS A MATCH!</b></font>