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$ echo '<a href="mailto:NA?Subject=AB42525216 - FOOBAR bla bla - bla">NA</a>'
<a href="mailto:NA?Subject=AB42525216 - FOOBAR bla bla - bla">NA</a>
$ echo '<a href="mailto:NA?Subject=AB42525216 - FOOBAR bla bla - bla">NA</a>' | sed 's/SOMEMAGIC/NA/g'
NA

My question: how can I remove the string in the "echo" with SOMEMAGIC? The delimiter could be > I think

share|improve this question
    
What part of string do you want to remove? –  Gnouc May 30 at 8:36
    
whops :) I updated it! Thanks.. –  evachristine May 30 at 8:52
    
Usually it's better to use a parser to process HTML. –  choroba May 30 at 8:56
    
sed 's/.*>\(.*\)<.*/\1/' would work on that particular input. But so would cut -d \> -f2- | cut -f\< -f1 –  Stéphane Chazelas May 30 at 9:12
    
@evachristine: Do you mean replace the whole line by NA? –  Gnouc May 30 at 9:16

1 Answer 1

up vote 0 down vote

I think you are trying to extract the value that are inside <a href>xx</a> tag. If yes then your command should be like this,

GNU sed:

sed -r 's/^<a [^>]*>([^<]*)<.*$/\1/g' file

Traditional sed:

sed 's/^<a [^>]*>\([^<]*\)<.*$/\1/g' file

Example:

$ echo '<a href="mailto:NA?Subject=AB42525216 - FOOBAR bla bla - bla">NA</a>' | sed -r 's/^<a [^>]*>([^<]*)<.*$/\1/g'
NA

$ echo '<a href="mailto:NA?Subject=AB42525216 - FOOBAR bla bla - bla">NA</a>' | sed 's/^<a [^>]*>\([^<]*\)<.*$/\1/g'
NA

$ echo '<a href="mailto:NA?Subject=AB42525216 - FOOBAR bla bla - bla">fooooooooooooooobaaaaaaaaaar</a>' | sed 's/^<a [^>]*>\([^<]*\)<.*$/\1/g'
fooooooooooooooobaaaaaaaaaar
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