I am trying to fetch a line from a file file.txt which looks like this:
>This is line 1.</li> >This is line 2.</li> >This is line 3.</li> >This is line 4.</li> I need to fetch content which starts with > and ends in </li> so the output will be This is line 1. This is line 2. and so on. I have looked into this in forum but didnt found solution. This solution also didnt worked.
I ultimately have to fetch some lines from a webpage. So first I will curl webpage and then use grep command to grep that line which starts with > and ends in </li>.
Thanks.!
12 Answers
This should be enough:
grep '^>.*</li>$' input-file The ^ and $ ensure that those parts are anchored at the start and end of the lines respectively.
You can also do:
grep -x '>.*</li>' input-file -x looks for an exact match: the whole line should match the pattern (which implies ^ and $ is wrapped around the pattern).
This is the input file:
$ cat /tmp/tmp.txt >This is line 1.</li> invalid line 1 >This is line 2.</li> >This is line 3.</li> invalid line 2 >This is line 4.</li> last invalid line Using grep and awk to extract the strings you want:
$ cat /tmp/tmp.txt | grep -E '>*</li>' | awk -F\> '{ print $2 }' | awk -F\< '{ print $1 }' This is line 1. This is line 2. This is line 3. This is line 4. 
