Using sed to remove paragraphs with variables - UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

BlueberryPickle · #1 07-03-2008

Hi everyone,

I have a file with multiple entries and I would like to remove the ones that contain either /A"> or /A/, where A can be any letter of the alphabet. Here's an example of the entries:

<Topic r:id="Top/World/Fran">
<catid>476</catid>
<link r:resource="http://fr.news.yahoo.com/"/>
<link r:resource="http://news.google.fr/"/>
<link r:resource="http://actualite.free.fr"/>
</Topic>
<Topic r:id="Top/World/Fran/Act/A_la_Une">
<catid>32293</catid>
<link r:resource="http://www.pluralworld.com/"/>
<link r:resource="http://www.webdopresse.ch/"/>
</Topic>
<Topic r:id="Top/World/Fran/A">
<catid>32069</catid>
</Topic>
<Topic r:id="Top/World/Fran/B/Stuff">
<catid>32069</catid>
</Topic>

So, in this case, I want to have a new file that does not keep the last two entries as the first contains /A"> and the second contains /B/.

I have tried with the following code, but it removes everything!

#!/bin/sh
# Removes topics that begin with a certain value
inputFile=$1

tempFile=$inputFile.tmp

# A number of indexing categories exist that have to be removed
ALPHABET="ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
n=0

while [ $n -lt ${#ALPHABET} ]
do
sed -n '/\/${ALPHABET:n:1}\">/,/<\/Topic>/!p' $tempFile.start > $tempFile.end
mv $tempFile.end $tempFile.start

sed -n '/\/${ALPHABET:n:1}\//,/<\/Topic>/!p' $tempFile.start > $tempFile.end
mv $tempFile.end $tempFile.start

n=$(( $n + 1 ))
done

Can anyone out there please help?

fpmurphy · #2 07-03-2008

The following works for ksh93

Code:

#!/bin/ksh93

while read line
do
   [[ "$line" = ~(E)(\/[[:alpha:]]\/|\/[[:alpha:]]\"\>$) ]] || print $line
done < file

exit 0

Output is

Code:

<Topic r:id="Top/World/Fran">
<catid>476</catid>
<link r:resource="http://fr.news.yahoo.com/"/>
<link r:resource="http://news.google.fr/"/>
<link r:resource="http://actualite.free.fr"/>
</Topic>
<Topic r:id="Top/World/Fran/Act/A_la_Une">
<catid>32293</catid>
<link r:resource="http://www.pluralworld.com/"/>
<link r:resource="http://www.webdopresse.ch/"/>
</Topic>
<catid>32069</catid>
</Topic>
<catid>32069</catid>
</Topic>

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