@samshaw:

Perhaps you should open your own thread?

For a start try this:

It will write the results of the sed command into an array HOSTS.

Will give you the values.

Sed is best learned by example. There are many pages with sed one liners.
This one here does the following:

-n only print if asked to print a line
's/ substitute
^<host every line starting with host
\([^<]*\) every character except a "<" and save what you have found in "\1"
.* the rest of the line
/\1/ substitute by what we have just save in \1
p' print this line.

The command does two tasks at a time: a) it finds all lines starting with
host..., b) it extracts the value between the tags.

HTH Chris