marcmann

Hi,

Trying to use SED with no luck.

I have a line in a file:

E=23=2003082163229=5.0#509=R000=MannMa@COSINC32341 2=

I want to extract from this line the MannMa part only - however this part will change depending on user so it isn't constant. The R000= before it is though if this is any help. I've played around with SED but can't get it to work. Any ideas?

Cheers

Marc

richrussell

You might have been better off using awk, but anyway, with sed, it's not too hard. There's probably a more elegant way, but this took me 30 seconds to come up with:

(assuming your list of strings is in a file called 'input')

$ cat input | sed 's/^.*=R000=//' | sed 's/@.*$//'

^.* matches everything from the beginning of the line (so up to and including the =R000= in this case)
.*$ matches everything to the end of the line (so everything including and after the @)

Rich.

marcmann

nice one mate that has worked a treat

Marc

Andrewza

sed -E '/^.*R000=(.*)\@.*/s//\1/';

stevencotton

perl -pi.bak -e 's/^.*?R000=(.*?)\@.*$/$1/' <file>

Makes the change in-place and backs up the file with a .bak extension

richrussell

I knew there were more elegant ways - but I did only spend 30 seconds on it whilst drinking my morning cup of tea!

Perl's overkill for this, sed/awk are plenty sufficient.

Rich.

stevencotton

I hoped more people would jump in with ever more overkill ways to do it. First person to give a REBOL solution will have my admiration

Andrewza

Used to use REBOL to create static copies of dynamic web pages with URL rewriting, bizarre language.

stevencotton

Cool. Did you choose it or was it something already in use?