extracting a string from html file with sed or awk

Ragnar157 · #1 (**permalink**) 07-21-2008

Hi,

i am downloading a html file with wget and now need to extract certain informations from it.

The string starts after "Attributes:" and ends before "Stats:". It may span across multiple Lines.
Within that string there are random additional strings that i need.
They have the pattern "String1:String2", these are the Attributes and their Values separated by a ":"

So based on the example below my result shuld be:
Category: Movies
Video Source: DVD
Video Format: WMV
Video Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Language: English
Audio Format: WMA

I tried sed with sed -n "/Attributes:/,/Stats:/p" but that will get the whole line and not only the text between the two strings.

I have not found a parameter to change that behavior.

Thanks in advance for any help
Rag

Quote:

d></tr><tr><th>Size:</th><td>89 files, 76 data, 13 recovery<br />Encoded: <span class="fileSize">3,705.4MB</span> data + <span class="fileSize">379.5MB</span> recovery = <span class="fileSize">4,084.8MB</span> total<br />Decoded: <span class="fileSize">3,557.1MB</span> data + <span class="fileSize">364.3MB</span> recovery = <span class="fileSize">3,921.4MB</span> total (estimated)</td></tr><tr><th>Nerw</th><td><a href="/asdasd/">fsdfsdf</a>, <a href="/adasdasd/">dfgdfg</a></td></tr><tr><th>Attributes:</th><td>Category: Movies<br />Video Source: DVD<br />Video Format: WMV<br />Video Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller<br />Language: English<br />Audio Format: WMA<br /></td></tr><tr><th>Stats:</th><td>25 views, <a href="#CommentsPH">0 comments</a></td></tr><tr><th>Editor Notes:</th><td><strong><span class="highlight">WMV is natively played back on xbox360.</span></strong></td></tr></table></div><div class="clear"></div><h3

second example on two lines:

Quote:

Reports from this Poster</a><br /><a href="/browse/all/f/?a_id=14402873">Browse Files from this Poster</a></td></tr><tr><th>Reported:</th><td>Monday 21 Jul 2008, 09:28AM CET (<span class="ageVeryNew">76 minutes ago</span>) (<span class="ageVeryNew">4 hours </span>after upload)</td></tr><tr><th>Posted:</th><td>Started: <span class="ageVeryNew">12 hours </span>ago, finished: <span class="ageVeryNew">6 hours </span>ago, duration: 6h 21m 59s<br />Approx upload speed: 219.9KB/sec</td></tr><tr><th>Size:</th><td>104 files, 88 data, 16 recovery<br />Encoded: <span class="fileSize">4,343.0MB</span> data + <span class="fileSize">579.0MB</span> recovery = <span class="fileSize">4,922.0MB</span> total<br />Decoded: <span class="fileSize">3,040.1MB</span> data + <span class="fileSize">405.3MB</span> recovery = <span class="fileSize">3,445.4MB</span> total (estimated)</td></tr><tr><th>Nwer:</th><td><a href="/werwerwer/">werwer</a></td></tr><tr><th>Attributes:</th><td>Category: Movies<br />Region System: PAL<br />Video Source: DVD<br />Video Format: DVD<br />Video Genre: Drama, War<br />Language: English<br />Subtitled Language: Dutch<br />Audio Format: AC3/DD<br /></td></tr><tr><th>Stats:</th><td>7 views, <a href="#CommentsPH">0 comments</a></td></tr><tr><th>Editor Notes:</th><td>None</td></tr></table></div><div class="clear"></div><h3 id="SimilarPH"><span style="float: right">[<a href="werwer">View All Similar Reports</a>] </span>Similar Reports (up to 5)</h3><div id="HideRelatedPosts" style="border: 1px solid black"><p style="text-align: center"><a href="#SimilarPH" onclick="
$('HideRelatedPosts').style.display = 'none';
$('ShowRelatedPosts').style.display = 'block';
">Currently hiding; click to view</a></p></div><div id="ShowRelatedPosts" style="display: none"><table summary="Post query results" class="dataTabular fixed"><thead><tr><th style="width: 20px"> </th><th style="width: 110px">Size <a title="Sort by the size of the posts (Ascend

it seems like its always "Attributes:</th><td>" at the start and "<br /></td></tr><tr><th>Stats:" at the End.

rubin · #2 (**permalink**) 07-21-2008

What is your OS ?

If you're on Linux try:

Code:

awk '/Stats/{f=0} f && NF; /Attributes/{f=1}'  RS="<[^>]+>" html_file

Output of the first example:

Code:

Category: Movies
Video Source: DVD
Video Format: WMV
Video Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Language: English
Audio Format: WMA

Output of the second example:

Code:

Category: Movies
Region System: PAL
Video Source: DVD
Video Format: DVD
Video Genre: Drama, War
Language: English
Subtitled Language: Dutch
Audio Format: AC3/DD

If there are opened tags somewhere in the records replace RS with:

Code:

RS="<[^>]+>|<[^>]+|[^>]+>"

Ragnar157 · #3 (**permalink**) 07-21-2008

Wow i have no idea how exactly that awk command is working, but fortunately i dont have to

Big thanks rubin! Im on Windows with the unixutils. i'll additionally clean the spaces gawk "/Stats/{f=0} f && NF; /Attributes/{f=1}" RS="]+>" index-3123947.html|sed -e "s/ //g">x.txt then set them as Environment variables in batch for /F "delims=: tokens=1,2" %f in (x.txt) do set nzb%f=%g

Ragnar157 · #4 (**permalink**) 07-21-2008

Now i wanted to use that on my XP download machine but unfortunately the wget output is different there.

The result has newline's and Tab's. For me all whitespace could be cleaned. space, tab, CR and LF.
I added: |sed -e "s/\t*//g"|tr -d "\n" but then i dont have any CR/LF left.

please help again
Thanks

Quote:

<th>Attributes:</th>
<td>
Category: Movies<br />
Video Source:
DVD <br />
Video Format:
XviD <br />
Video Genre:
Animation, Family, Fantasy <br />
Language:
English <br />
Audio Format:
MP3 <br />
</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<th>Stats:</th>

after awk

Quote:

Category: Movies

Video Source:

DVD

Video Format:

XviD

Video Genre:

Animation,
Family,

Fantasy

Language:

English

Audio Format:

MP3

rubin · #5 (**permalink**) 07-21-2008

If I understood correctly your requirement, the following code will remove extra spaces, newlines and tabs.

Code:

awk  '/Stats/{f=0}{$1=$1} !/^$/ && f; /Attributes/{f=1}' RS="<[^>]+>|\n+"  html > out_html.txt

After running the command save the file as text file, and then use Wordpad or MS Word to open the output file ( not Notepad ), so the newlines are preserved in the output.

From your other sample, this is the output from running the code on Cygwin ( on Windows):

Code:

Category: Movies
Video Source:
DVD
Video Format:
XviD
Video Genre:
Animation, Family, Fantasy
Language:
English
Audio Format:
MP3

Is this what you required ?

fpmurphy · #6 (**permalink**) 07-21-2008

Not to detract from this solution, but it appears to only work with gawk.

Ragnar157 · #7 (**permalink**) 07-22-2008

works great! Thanks a lot!

But now i need something else

But thats should be easy.

I need to split a string at the last \
i managed to get the last part: echo D:\DATA\XY\what ever (nr2)|sed -e "s/.*\\//g" = what ever (nr2)
But i dont know how to extract from start to the last \ so i get D:\DATA\XY

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