Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello Experts,

I am being silly here and just need someone to point out what the silliness is

I have a bunch of lines that are
12343 words here that can chage (hat:98-345) more word and numbers here

I just want to pick out the numbers after "hat:" which is in every line. I have been using
echo $thing | sed 's/\(hat:[0-9]*[0-9]-[0-9]*[0-9]*\).*/\1/'
which yields
12343 words here that can chage (hat:98-345

I just want 98-345

What am I missing?

Thanks

try to use translate..

tr "(hat:" " " your_file | tr ")" " " > OUTPUT

Regards

Hi,
Thanks but this does not work for me

*> cat test
12343 words here that can chage (hat:98-345) more word and numbers here
*> tr "(hat:" " " test | tr ")" " "
tr: too many arguments
Try `tr --help' for more information.

sorry.... dont forget the sign in blue

tr "(hat:" " " < your_file | tr ")" " " > OUTPUT

Thanks but this just replaces (hat and ) with white spaces.

I would like to use this in a script and for each line of the file get those numbers

ie.
cat test
12343 words here that can chage (hat:98-345) more word and numbers here

while read line; do
var="$(echo $line | sed magic here)"
echo "$var"
done<test


output
98-345

Thanks for the help thus far

You put the \( in the wrong place

Correct version:
echo $thing | sed 's/hat:\([0-9]*[0-9]-[0-9]*[0-9]*\).*/\1/'

You could probably recuce that to:
echo $thing | sed 's/hat:\([0-9]*-[0-9]*\).*/\1/'

Maybe even:
echo $thing | sed 's/hat:\([0-9-]*\).*/\1/'
(not too sure about the usage of '-' between '[' and ']'

\( and \) are markers where your 'group' begins and ends.
That same group is later recalled with \1

Yes, you can use multiple \( and \) and then recall those with \1, \2, \3, etc...

Thanks for the help but its still not what I want.

I tried

*> set line="12343 words here that can chage (hat:98-345) more word and numbers here"
*> echo $line | sed 's/hat:\([0-9-]*\).*/\1/'
12343 words here that can chage (98-345

so now it gets rid of the "hat" which is good now if only it would get rid of the rest of "12343 words here that can chage (" too then it would be perfect

I am trying other things, I guess I just do not fully understand sed