Extracting a string from a string in linux

Question

Extract the value for OWNER in the following:

{{USERID 9898}}{{OWNER Wayne, Daniel}}{{EMAIL [email protected]}}

To get this string I am using grep on a text file. In all other cases only one value is contained on each line, so they are not an issue. My problem is removing the text after OWNER but before the }} brackets, leaving me with only the string 'Wayne, Daniel'.

So far I have began looking into writing a for loop to go through the text a character at a time, but I feel there is a more elegant solution then my limited knowledge of unix.

Amit · Accepted Answer · 2015-01-08 19:08:20Z

3

With grep

> cat file
{{USERID 9898}}{{OWNER Wayne, Daniel}}{{EMAIL [email protected]}}

> grep -Po '(?<=OWNER )[\w, ]*' file
Wayne, Daniel

answered Jan 8, 2015 at 19:08

Amit

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Lorenz · Accepted Answer · 2015-01-08 18:55:01Z

3

Try cat file.txt | perl -n -e'/OWNER ([^\}]+)/ && print $1'

answered Jan 8, 2015 at 18:55

Lorenz

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2 Comments

Danial Wayne Over a year ago

returns a single quote. I haven't used perl yet, I will look into that.

Amit Over a year ago

If there are multiple matches, this will concatenate them. Also cat is not required here.

anubhava · Accepted Answer · 2015-01-08 19:02:45Z

3

You can use this awk:

awk -F '{{|}}' '{sub(/OWNER +/, "", $4); print $4}' file
Wayne, Daniel

answered Jan 8, 2015 at 19:02

anubhava

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Alan · Accepted Answer · 2015-01-08 19:19:50Z

1

Try this. I use cut

INPUT="{{USERID 9898}}{{OWNER Wayne, Daniel}}{{EMAIL [email protected]}}"
SUBSTRING=`echo $INPUT| cut -d' ' -f3`
SUBSTRING2=`echo $INPUT| cut -d',' -f2`
SUBSTRING2=`echo $SUBSTRING2| cut -d'}' -f1`
echo $SUBSTRING$SUBSTRING2

maybe is not the most elegant way but works.

answered Jan 8, 2015 at 19:19

Alan

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