Extract multiple line string from HTML file using specific tags

Regex isn't really capable of parsing html completely.

There is a command line tool called xidel that lets you use XPath or CSS selectors to pull out the bits you want.

Something like this would meet your stated requirement:

./xidel test.html --extract '//span[@class="style530"]' --output-format bash

But note that this returns more than your required output as you have one unclosed <span class="style530">

Use HTMLParser for such actions:

#!/usr/bin/python
# vim: set fileencoding=utf8 :
# (c) fazie

from HTMLParser import HTMLParser
import re
import sys

class MyParser(HTMLParser):
    inside_span = False

    def __init__(self,file):
        HTMLParser.__init__(self)
        f = open(file)
        self.feed(f.read())

    def handle_starttag(self,tag,attrs):
        if tag == 'span':
            for name,value in attrs:
                if name=='class' and value=='style530':
                    self.inside_span=True

    def handle_data(self,data):
        data = data.strip(' \t\r\n')
        if data != "":
            if self.inside_span:
                data = re.sub('\n',' ',data)
                data = re.sub('\s\s+',' ',data)
                print data

    def handle_endtag(self,tag):
        if tag == 'span':
            self.inside_span=False

MyParser(sys.argv[1])

Run it:

python myparser.py inputfile.html

You can try something like below.

awk -vRS='<' '
  inside || /^span[^>]*class="style530"/ {
    inside = 1
    if (/^span/)
      n++
    else if (/^\/span>/ && !--n) {
      $0="/span>\n"
      inside=0
    }
    printf "<%s", $0
  }' file.html | sed '/^</ d' | grep -v ">$"

However, it is not advisable to extract using HTML headers. Please see here for why you should not parse HTML pages. I would suggest you to use curl and w3m to remove the HTML headers after which the parsing will become little simpler.

For simple extractions from xml/html texts I like to use xidel with CSS selectors.

In this example, to select all span elements with attribute class containing the word style530, we can use

xidel --css span.style530 --xml

xidel has many options. The input provided by question is a bit noisy. In less noisy situations, with --xml we may get something like

<xml>
  <span class="style530">case 1 </span>
  <span class="menu style530 otherclass">case 2 </span>
  ...
</xml>