Provided by: texlive-extra-utils_2024.20250309-2_all 
NAME
match_parens - find mismatches of various brackets and quotes
Synopsis
match_parens [filename]
Options
-h
print this help and exit
-H,--help
print full documentation and exit
-V,--version
print version and exit
-l,--latex
convert ``...'' to “...” before testing
-n,--number=N
set number of mismatching characters shown to N (default: 10)
-p,--pairs=S
set matching pairs to S (default: {}[]()""“”''‘’)
--test
do an internal test and exit
Description
Mismatches of parentheses, braces, (angle) brackets, especially in TeX sources which may be rich in
those, may be difficult to trace. This little script helps you by writing your text to standard output,
after adding a left margin to your text, which will normally be almost empty, but will clearly show up to
10 mismatches. (Just try me on myself to see that the parenthesis starting this sentence will not appear
to be matched at the end of the file. If you look at me in the vim editor, then select this paragraph and
try the command: :!%.
By default, the following pairs are tested:
()
round brackets or parentheses
{}
curly brackets or braces
[]
square brackets
<>
angle brackets (within html text only)
ASCII double quotes
“”
Unicode double quotation marks
''
ASCII single quotes
‘’
Unicode single quotation marks
The exit value of the script is 0 when there are no mismatches, 1 otherwise.
Angle brackets are only looked for inside HTML text, where HTML is supposed to start with <html> or
=begin␣rdoc and to end with </html> or =end.
Options
-h,--help
print short help information and exit.
-H,--Help
print full documentation via less and exit.
-V,--version
print this script's version and exit.
-l,--latex
convert ``...'' to “...” before testing.
-n,--number=N
Set number of mismatching characters shown to N. By default, only the first 10 are shown.
-p,--pairs=S
Set matching pairs to S (default: {}[]()""“”''‘’). For example, if you want to look for
mismatching ASCII single quotes only, use --pairs="''". Or, if you want to match braces and
guillemets only, use -p␣«». Note that if html is detected in your text, <> is automatically added
to the pairs list. So by default, <...> is tested only in html, but you can test that in other
text by specifying the <> pair in the --pairs option.
--test
do an internal test and exit. Note that if, with the --pairs option, you specify an other pairs
list than the default, the test will probably fail, but you can still see the effects of your
pairs list on the test data.
Examples
Suppose we have two files, good and bad, containing these texts:
good:
This is a (simple) test without mismatches
bad:
This is a (simple test containing mismatches
then here are some usage examples. First a simple test on these files: $ matchparens good
1 || This is a (simple) test
2 || without mismatches
$ echo $?
0
$ matchparens bad
1 | (| This is a (simple test
2 | (| containing mismatches
$ echo $?
1
Just report if there are mismatches: $ matchparens good >/dev/null && echo fine || echo problems
fine
$ matchparens bad >/dev/null && echo fine || echo problems
problems
Report all tex files with mismatches in the current directory: $ for i in *.tex; do matchparens $i
>/dev/null || echo $i; done
Matches must be in correct order: $ echo -e "This is a ([simple)] test0 | match_parens
1 ([)]This is a ([simple)] test
2 ([)]
Author
Wybo Dekker (wybo@dekkerdocumenten.nl)
Copyright
Released under the GNU General Public License (www.gnu.orgcopyleftgpl.html)
match_parens version 1.44 March 23, 2023 match_parens(1)