Trying to get a list of names on a site between "

Question

cat file | grep "<span class='s-name'>" | awk '/"<span class='s-name'>"/ && /</span>

something about this seems wrong. I mean, other than it's not working.

I also want to put it into a file which I'm pretty sure is just 'filename' at the end.

Answer 1

Using GNU grep

Input

$ cat infile
<div class='signer'> <span class='s-name'>Bob Lepine</span> <span class='s-title'>Vice President of Content, FamilyLife</span> </div>

Output

$ grep -Po "(?<=<span class='s-name'>).*?(?=</span>)" infile
Bob Lepine

$ grep -Po "(?<=<span class='s-title'>).*?(?=</span>)" infile
Vice President of Content, FamilyLife

Answer 2

Using xml/html parsers is the proper way to parse xml/html content, xmlstarlet solution:

xmlstarlet sel -t -v "//span[@class='s-name']" yourfile

The output:

Bob Lepine