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I have a line of text which looks like hh^ay-pau+h@ow, I want to extract the text between - and + which in this case is pau. This should be done in bash. Any help would be appreciated. EDIT: I want to extract the text between the first occurence of the tokens PS: My google search didn't take me anywhere. I apologize if this question is already asked.

tster
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dineshdileep
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6 Answers6

5

The way to do this in pure bash, is by using parameter expansions in bash

$ a=hh^ay-pau+h@ow
$ b=${a%%+*}
$ c=${b#*-}
$ echo $c
pau

b: remove everything including and behind the first + occurence c: remove everything excluding and before the first - ocurrence

More info about substring removing in bash parameter expansion

Bernhard
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2

Try

grep -Po "(?<=\-).*?(?=\+)"

For example,

echo "hh^ay-pau+h@ow" | grep -Po "(?<=\-).*?(?=\+)"
Vytenis Bivainis
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2

If you have only one occurence of - and + you can use cut:

 $ echo "hh^ay-pau+h@ow" | cut -d "-" -f 2 | cut -d "+" -f 1
 pau
Nicolae Namolovan
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2

Assuming one occurence of + and -, you can stick to bash

IFS=+- read -r _ x _ <<<'hh^ay-pau+h@ow'             
echo $x
pau
iruvar
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0

If you're guarenteed to only have one - and one + .

 % echo "hh^ay-pau+h@ow" | sed -e 's/.*-//' -e 's/+.*//'
 pau
eduffy
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  • could you please explain the sed command, actually I wanted to extract the text between the first occurence of "-" and "+". There are multiple occurences of both tokens – dineshdileep May 26 '14 at 17:52
0
echo "hh^ay-pau+h@ow" | awk -F'-' '{print $2}' |awk -F'+' '{print $1}'
Emilio Galarraga
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