UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Ok, this has got to be simple, but I can't wrap my head around it.

I'm trying to divid up different parts of a line being inputted. The reason is so I don't have to worry about what order the information is place, I can sort it before it's added to my file.

the line would look something like this
+myproject 50 013107 misc text here maybe

I need each piece to be found and placed in it's variable -- then some other actions maybe added to it. Anyway, I started the first "+myproject"

Code:

project=$( echo $input | sed 's/[^\+[:alpha:]]//g' )

this finds "+myproject" but it also grabs the misc text. How do I get it to stop looking once it returns the project name. i.e. it should only return the "term" if it has the + sign in front.

Code:

echo "+myproject 50 013107 misc text here maybe" | while read a b c d e f g
do
echo $a $b $c $d $e $f $g
done

or

Code:

a=$( echo "+myproject 50 013107 misc text here maybe" | cut -d" " -f1 )

Code:

project=$( echo $input | sed 's/^\([^ ]*\).*/\1/g' )

Those solutions only work if "+myproject" is the first item entered. But what if a user put in
76 +myproject 013107 mics text

I need to be able to find "+myproject" in the string where ever it is and return only that.

Code:

echo "76 +myproject 013107 mics text" | sed 's/^.*\(\+[^ ]*\).*/\1/g'

that's the one! Thanks. Can you possibly explain it?

Code:

echo "76 +myproject 013107 mics text" | sed 's/^.*\(\+[^ ]*\).*/\1/g'

\(\+[^ ]*\) this match string contains + and followed by any characters other than space.
.* matches any number of characters