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I searched around and found these 2 topics, however they're different as the number of space is fixed while my sample doesn't have fixed space count.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47428445/i-want-grep-to-grep-one-word-which-is-having-spaces-it

https://askubuntu.com/questions/949326/how-to-include-a-space-character-with-grep

Sample text:

<span>Section 1: Plan your day, write out your plan</span>

Desired Output:

Section 1: Plan your day, write out your plan

I would like to grep text only, and not HTML tag. Here is my attempt.

wolf@linux:~$ cat file.txt 
<span>Section 1: Plan your day, write out your plan</span>
wolf@linux:~$ 

wolf@linux:~$ grep -oP 'S\S+ \d: \S+' file.txt 
Section 1: Plan
wolf@linux:~$ 

wolf@linux:~$ grep -oP 'S\S+ \d: \S+ \S+' file.txt 
Section 1: Plan your
wolf@linux:~$

Is there better solution rather than defining \S+ one by one as the length of text is different?

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    I wouldn't try to use space/non-space as the determiner here (what happens when you get to plan</span> for example, which is all non-space?). Instead, consider using lookarounds ex. grep -oP '(?<=<span>).*(?=</span>)' or even just grep -oP '(?<=>).*(?=<)' Commented Feb 21, 2021 at 13:00
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    Are the tags always <span> </span> or are they ever something else? Commented Feb 21, 2021 at 13:33
  • @NasirRiley, this is actually from HTML file, so there are tons of HTML tags in it. The text that I'm looking for always started with Section \d: Commented Feb 21, 2021 at 14:40
  • For grep, it does not matter if there are html tags if you search for strings like Section 1:. Regarding html tags I would use some of programs for stripping html tags (w3m, html2text), after grep has found the text. You could also first strip html tags and then search for your strings. Commented Feb 21, 2021 at 16:01

6 Answers 6

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With extended regexes, anchoring on the Section keyword and taking everything after it that's not a <:

$ grep -E -o 'Section [0-9]+:[^<]*' < file.txt
Section 1: Plan your day, write out your plan

I find that anchoring on the surrounding parts is easiest done with Perl, so if that's an option:

$ perl -lne 'print $1 if m,<span>(Section \d+:.*?)</span>,' < file.txt
Section 1: Plan your day, write out your plan

(There are ways to do a similar thing with grep -P, but I find them somewhat hard to read.)

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If your HTML is valid XML you can use xmlstarlet to pick out the appropriate element value.

xmlstarlet sel -t -v '//span' -n file.html
Section 1: Plan your day, write out your plan

Without more of your page structure I can't offer a better XPath (//span), but for example, if you know the span is inside a div you could use //div/span. There are many more selection options available

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Sounds to be you want to match sequences of characters other than < and > that contain  <number>:, so:

grep -Po '[^<>]* \d+:[^<>]*'
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A little bit off topic but could be useful there is a great open source project called "pup" https://github.com/EricChiang/pup it is a command line parser for html and uses css selectors. Small project and deserve more attention then it gets it is basically "jq" for html.

Jason C.

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  • didn't hear pup, sounds a good tool, specially grep'ing based on the tags!! Commented Feb 21, 2021 at 18:26
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Perl look(ahead|behind) can be helpfull:

grep -Po "(?<=>).+(?=</)" yourfile

This match anything between html tags and strip out these

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command:

awk -F "[<>]" '{print $3}' filename

output

Section 1: Plan your day, write out your plan
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