Hi,

I have searched all over the forums for a problem similar to mine. I have found many but i have not been able to get them to work for me unfortunately!

What i am attempting to do is to extract part of a string from a line in a file. This line appears multiple times in the file. Example file:

<SOAP </m:req><m:body><m:string>AAA1234AA</m:string></m:body></m:req></SOAP>
<SOAP </m:req><m:body><m:string>BBB1234BB</m:string></m:body></m:req></SOAP>
<SOAP </m:req><m:body><m:string>CCC1234CC</m:string></m:body></m:req></SOAP>
<SOAP </m:req><m:body><m:string>DDD1234DD</m:string></m:body></m:req></SOAP>

sed 's/\([A-Z]{3}[0-9]{4}[A-Z]{2}\).*/\1/' file

sed -n 's/.*\([A-Z]{3}[0-9]{4}[A-Z]{2}\).*/\1/p' file

sed -n 's/.*\(AAA1234AA\).*/\1/p' file

Using awk

awk -F'[<|>]' '{ print $8 }' filename

That does not work as i forgot to mention that there are other lines also in the file in the format

<m:string>zzz1234ZZ</m:string>

Are they always situated at the same place (position in the line)?

Try this instead:

awk -F'[<|>]' '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++) { if($i=="m:string") print $(i+1); }}' filename

sed 's/.*<m:string>// 
        s/<\/m:string>.*//'  filename

awk -F "<(/)?m:string>" '{print $2}' file