Extracting text between a start and end point in grep - first instance only

Question

How do I extract text in between strings first instance only.

Source:

test66="keyword1"y67h6y7 test66="keyword2"hj67h67j
test66="keyword3"f54fd543f456

output:

keyword1

It's not very clear what you mean with "between strings". Try to improve the explanation as well as give some of your attempts. — fedorqui, Oct 27 '14 at 10:10

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:20

1

sed -n '/test66="\(.*\)"/ {s//\1/p; q}' source.txt

edited May 23 '17 at 12:20

Community

answered Oct 27 '14 at 08:17

John Zwinck

this does not work correctly for test66="keyword1" test66="keyword2" – barway Oct 27 '14 at 09:39

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 27 '14 at 08:44

1

grep -m 1 -oP 'test66="\K[^"]*'

Output:

keyword1

answered Oct 27 '14 at 08:44

Cyrus

score 0 · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-27T12:54:01.390

0

awk way
Works for your updated requirements

awk '{x=match($0,/test66="([^"]+)"/,a)}x{print a[1];exit}' file

sed way

sed -n '/test66="\([^"]\+\)".*/{s//\1/p;q}' file

They both do pretty much the exact same thing.

1.Search for string

2.Store value inbetween quotes.

3.Print that value

4.Quit

edited Oct 27 '14 at 12:54

answered Oct 27 '14 at 10:22

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 27 '14 at 12:16

0

This might work for you (GNU sed):

sed -r '/test66="/{s//\n/;s/^[^\n]*\n([^"]*)".*/\1/;q}' file

Replace the required pattern with a marker i.e. \n and remove strings either side of the marker, print and quit.

answered Oct 27 '14 at 12:16

potong

4 Answers4