FreeBSD MacOS Grep Spanning Multiple Lines

Question

Using MacOS High Sierra, trying to using grep to extract the text between two "tags." Intended output should be "The Genre". Here's the .txt file:

<genre>
The Genre
</genre>

Here's the grep command that's not working:

genre=$(grep -o '(?<=<genre>).*?(=<\/genre>)' textfile.txt)

echo $genre

I am approaching this the wrong way for MacOS? All the commands I've seen with tags only support BNU or Linux variants. Help appreciated

If you use a PCRE regex use `grep` with `-P` option, or use `pcregrep` — Wiktor Stribiżew, Oct 14 '19 at 13:36
(Being line-based) `grep` is not the tool for it. This is a good start: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38972736/how-to-print-lines-between-two-patterns-inclusive-or-exclusive-in-sed-awk-or — James Brown, Oct 14 '19 at 13:45

Alexander Ushakov · Answer 1 · 2023-02-09T06:05:13.967

For multiline search you can use MacOS/FreeBSD pcregrep utility. It is installed with pcre package

pcregrep -o -M '(?s)(?<=<genre>).*(?=<\/genre>)' textfile.txt

Command explanation:

-o - show matched string

-M - use multiline search

(?s) - make "." to match any character whatsoever, even a newline

(?<=<genre>) - match prefix <genre> but not show it in output

(?=<\/genre>) - match postfix </genre> but not show it in output

Important note: This command will match everything between opening and closing tags including newlines. So output will be this:


The Genre

1 Answers1