ignore filename when pipelining rg

[Kyle0923]

consider bar.txt with the following content

foo

rg foo | rg bar will match this record because the first search outputs bar.txt:foo
in this case, I want to strictly limit my search inside the content, and exclude the filename

Is there a way currently in rg to skip the filename part?

[BurntSushi]

The only way is to either suppress the filename from the output with --no-filename, or adjust your regex to account for it. For example, rg '^[^:]+:bar' won't match bar.txt:foo. But of course, this isn't always correct, for example, in cases where the path can contain a colon. It also might need some tweaking to account for line numbers.

[Kyle0923]

Thanks for the reply. And thanks for rg, it has been my day-to-day searching tool for a long time

--no-filename is not gonna be very useful because often times, rg is used to search multiple files, losing filename will just lose track of the searching.
for now, i am gonna try with some regexes - ^[^:]+:.*bar for filename or ^[^:]+:[0-9]+:.*bar for filename:line_num, but it still has some limitations / costs. For one, I need a longer regex even when my ask is quite simple - grep a word; secondly, the coloring will be a mess, because the regex matches from the filename to bar

If I may, I want to propose a --field n option which effectively does a sed -E -e 's/^([^:]+:){n-1}//' (field is n, so we ignore first n-1 fields) during search while preserving the presentation. So one can do

# bar.txt
foo
# baz.txt
foo bar

> rg foo | rg --field 2 bar
baz.txt: foo bar
> rg --line-number foo | rg --field 3 bar
baz.txt:1: foo bar

Admittedly, if the filename contains a colon, this will not work, but I think it is rare to have colon in filename anyway

We can even take this one step further.
For example, if I want to grep the PPID (3rd) column in ps -ef
I can say ps -ef | rg --field-separator ' ' --field 3 <pattern> to grep for the third column (borrowing from awk)
but then in this case, we need to provide a syntax to express from field 3 onward, maybe --field 3+
so in our bar.txt, baz.txt example, the cmd becomes rg foo | rg --field 2+ bar in case where the file content contains :