BASH Tricks | /home/tom

Howto print text between tags or characters with awk or sed

Submitted by tom on 28. April 2009 - 21:52

Took me a while to figure out this one. All I wanted to do is to print the text between two tags/characters/strings.

The IMHO nicer Awk way:

$ echo "bla(foo)"|awk -F'[(|)]' '{print $2}'
foo

$ echo "bla=@@foo@@"|awk -F'[@@|@@]' '{print $3}'
foo

and with sed:

$ echo "blah(foo)"|sed -n 's/.*(\([^ ]*\))/\1/p'
foo

echo "aaafoobbb"|sed -n 's/.*aaa\([^ ]*\)bbb/\1/p'
foo

Figured.

Submitted by tom on 3. December 2008 - 22:04

I'm sure I can use this one quite often.

1) Arrays are nice to avaoid temporaray files

2) Spaces in file names are a PITA. But there are nice ways to work around this

Array[0]="/some/path/to/mooo foo.txt"
Array[1]="/some/path/to/mooo foo bar 2.txt"
Array[2]="/some/path/to/mooo foo bar 3.txt"

There we have some example array.