sed/awk: extract one number from string

Question

I have many lines like the following being returned from a bash command, with different sourceNodeIds of varying digit lengths:

<NodeAssociation sourceNodeId="33654" [...] sourceNodeEntity="Issue" />

I'd like to pipe it to sed or awk and just return the number nnnn from sourceNodeId="nnnn"

something like:

cat blah | sed 's/.+?sourceNodeId="\(\d+\)".+/\1/'

but this isn't working. I'm on a Mac if that makes any difference (I think the version of sed may be different). I know Perl regexes, but I think sed is expecting a different kind.

Thanks!!!

You might consider moving this to stackoverflow, I'm sure we'll be able to help but they might be quicker. — Chopper3, Sep 22 '10 at 16:31

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 22 '10 at 16:47

3

sed doesn't know about \d and non-greedy matches. You don't need to use cat. This should work:

sed 's/.*sourceNodeId="\([0-9]\+\)".*/\1/' file

Some sed versions are picky about wanting a -e (it will work even if it's not required):

sed -e 's/.*sourceNodeId="\([0-9]\+\)".*/\1/' file

If your sed supports -r you can skip the escaping:

sed -er 's/.*sourceNodeId="([0-9]+)".*/\1/' file

answered Sep 22 '10 at 16:47

Dennis Williamson

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thanks! I couldn't get it to work on mac, but it's great on linux. I'm piping from other input, hence the cat. I did have to just use sed -r though. – carillonator Sep 22 '10 at 17:20
On OS X, use `-E` instead of `-r`. – Dennis Williamson Jan 10 '11 at 14:05

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 21 '12 at 21:38

1

Also, works:

cat blah | cut -f2 -d\"

edited Jul 21 '12 at 21:38

Lucas Kauffman

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answered Sep 22 '10 at 19:30

fatherlinux

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sed/awk: extract one number from string

2 Answers2