Extracting text with script

Question

We have an xml file of the following format:

<mailBox>
...
</mailBox>
<mailBox>demon</mailBox>
<tz>16385</tz>
<Contact>
....
</Contact>
</mailBox>
<mailBox>
...
</mailBox>

Is there a way to extract a particular node out of this xml using a sed/awk/grep one-liner?
I was looking for somethign in the format

`sed -n 'mailBox\>demon,......p`

Don't attempt to parse XML using regex. `xmlstarlet` might help. — devnull, Mar 11 '14 at 09:39
Yes, trying to parse XML with regexp is a *bad* idea: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8577060/why-is-it-such-a-bad-idea-to-parse-xml-with-regex ... — MarcoS, Mar 11 '14 at 09:40
thanks - but its a pretty simple xml for me(without nested tags).And i needed a quick hit for troubleshooting. — IUnknown, Mar 11 '14 at 09:42
Or, similar answer for HTML: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4231382/regular-expression-pattern-not-matching-anywhere-in-string/4234491#4234491 — choroba, Mar 11 '14 at 09:42

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 11 '14 at 13:31

0

on your sample the tag demon is on the same line and not in rest of file. Error or specific

If it's an error (so mailbox tag are on separate lines)

sed -n '1h;1!H;${x
s/.*\(<mailBox>demon.*\)/\1/;s|</mailBox>.*||;p
}' YourFile

edited Mar 11 '14 at 13:31

jaypal singh

answered Mar 11 '14 at 10:02

NeronLeVelu

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 11 '14 at 12:20

0

You could try:

perl -0777 -nE 'foreach (/<mailBox>(.*?)<\/mailBox>/sg) {say $_}' file

answered Mar 11 '14 at 12:20

Håkon Hægland

2 Answers2