Shell Programming and Scripting

Padow,

The example I provided has two occurances of <> within the same line. The final script will need to work with much more complex lines some containing 5 or 6 <>. I'm not oppossed to using perl, i also don't mind doing this in multiple commands. For example using one command to remove the beggining of the line up to the first < then using the awk command I have to delete the rest of the data in the line. This is the approach I am trying now. If someone has a perl command(s) to do the same I would be willing to try it.

Thanks

Code:

nawk -F'<|>' '{ for(i=2;i<=NF;i+=2) printf("%s%c", $i, (i==NF-1)?RS:OFS)}' myFile

Code:

awk 'BEGIN{RS="<";FS="> "}{print $1}' filename

- sets record separator to "<" and field separator to ">": So, from

Code:

this is a <test> of removing <text> outside brackets

you have a set of records:

Code:

this is a 
test> of removing 
text> outside brackets

- and you are printing the first field before the ">" - it is obviose that you have what you have.
To remove first 'record' in your brake-down by "<" - use NR, when it is not 1: NR>1 or if (NR>1):

Code:

src> echo "some text <frst> more text <scnd> ending"| nawk 'BEGIN{FS=">"; RS="<";} NR>1 {print $1}'
frst
scnd

It is new for me the construction '<|>', but I gess it means : field separator is '<' OR '>'
And you are printing only second field - so, what should you expect?!
Having that -F'<|>' you should only print even fields:

Code:

echo "some text <frst< else >scnd> end"| nawk -F'<|>' '{for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) if (i%2==0) print $i}'
frst
scnd

- but now the AWK does not care which separator is used: see I have used them incorrectly, and it is not a problem for this code.

Thanks, both vgersh99 and alex_5161 solutions works.

For sed:

Code:

echo "some text <frst.> else <scnd> end"| sed 's/[^<]*[<]*\([^>]*\)>*/\1/g'
frst.scnd

- the text from \( to \) is saved by sed as a \1 (one more usage of the \(\) pair will saved \2, and so on..); so, that text is used for substitution.
That is what you had removed in your post.
Now need only remove everything else
So, part before open angle: [^<]* - everything, but not '<'
Next, the '<' is in range to have the '*' after that - so, having 0 or more times: than is needed to remove ending part that does not have the '<'.

I hope it is understandable.

A snippet that can be added to something bigger:

{
i = split($0, a)
for(n=1; n<=i; n++)
{
if (match(a[n], /<.*>/) > 0)
print a[n]
}
}

use below:-

Code:

nawk -v FS="<|>" '{print $1,$4}'

BR