Pull lines from log file between two strings with a third string inbetween

Question

I'm looking for a command line way (on SunOS) to pull from a log file xml messages which contain a particular string.

For example, the log file might contain xml messages of the form:

<message>
    <body>
        <tags> uniqueId="123456" </tags>
    </body>
</message>

Alongside other timestamped log lines. There might be several xml messages which contain the same ID as the same record may have been run several times.

To pull out the xmls currently I have this awk command:

nawk '$0~s{for(c=NR-b;c<=NR+a;c++)r[c]=1}{q[NR]=$0}END{for(c=1;c<=NR;c++)if(r[c])print q[c]}' b=4 a=15 s="someUniqueId" file

The problem I have is this pulls out a specific number of lines. However, the xmls may vary in length and I'm struggling to find a way to modify this so that it finds the unique ID and pulls all lines up until "<message>" and all lines down until "</message>"

`nawk` is old and lacking in functionaity. `/usr/xpg4/bin/awk` is closer to POSIX in functionality so it's a better choice of awk to use on Solaris. — Ed Morton, Mar 22 '19 at 13:40

James Brown · Accepted Answer · 2019-03-22T13:37:00.090

This probably works in the perfect world (if I understood your question right):

$ cat file
<message>
    <body>
        <tags> uniqueId="123455" </tags>
    </body>
</message>
<message>
    <body>
        <tags> uniqueId="123456" </tags>      # the one we want
    </body>
</message>
<message>
    <body>
        <tags> uniqueId="123457" </tags>
    </body>
</message>

The awk:

$ awk '
{ 
    b=b ORS $0                            # buffer records
}
/<message>/ {                             
    b=$0                                  # reset buffer
} 
/<\/message>/ && b~/uniqueId="123456"/ {  # if condition met at the end marker
    print b                               # output buffer
}' file

Output:

<message>
    <body>
        <tags> uniqueId="123456" </tags>      # the one we wanted
    </body>
</message>

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 22 '19 at 14:38

You can try Perl also,

perl -0777 -ne ' while( m{(<message>(.+?)</message>)}sg ) 
     { $x=$1; if($x=~/uniqueId="123456"/) { print "$1\n" }} ' edman.txt

using the input from @James,

$ cat edman.txt
<message>
    <body>
        <tags> uniqueId="123455" </tags>
    </body>
</message>
<message>
    <body>
        <tags> uniqueId="123456" </tags>      # the one we want
    </body>
</message>
<message>
    <body>
        <tags> uniqueId="123457" </tags>
    </body>
</message>

$ perl -0777 -ne ' while( m{(<message>(.+?)</message>)}sg ) 
    { $x=$1; if($x=~/uniqueId="123456"/) { print "$x\n" }} ' edman.txt
<message>
    <body>
        <tags> uniqueId="123456" </tags>      # the one we want
    </body>
</message>
$

Pull lines from log file between two strings with a third string inbetween

2 Answers2