Shell Programming and Scripting

Inner text?

You mean the text inside the URL used for display?

yes.

Code:

<a href="http://www.blah.com" ....  > Inner text </a>

This is easy with Perl regex. We run this type of PHP code using Perl regex daily.

heh, Its easy when the regex is already done for us.
Anyway, if you happen to have it, please post it. I very much like to take a look. thanks in advance.

Hahaha... thanks kurumi, for helping me make a point during this thread.

Yes, regex can be complex, and I have found the online, web-based tools are not very good compared to the fat client ones, like Regex Buddy, that run natively on XP and Wine/Linux.

If you download Regex Buddy (not sure if there is a free version) you can easily find a number of canned complex regex that can extract all the info in URLs, since this is a common task.

Then, if you have some test cases, like cutting-and-pasting an HTML page, like the Google page used in this thread into the tool, you can easily debug, step-by-step.

So putting together a complex regex with the proper tool can be done in a matter of minutes.

I agree that regex can be complex, but just because it is complex, we should not say "it cannot be done only with regex", because I assure you it can.

... and I leave it up to you to do it. However, you may need a proper regex tool (not the simple online ones), and if you have a proper regex tool, you will save (you and your employer) a lot of time and money, because the price of a good regex tool (like Regex Buddy, under $40) can easily save a sys admin or programmer hours of work.

As I mentioned, it is cool to see a number of other solutions, but this is an easy regex problem, with a proper regex tool (complex, without a proper tool). Go get one

Hi.

For URL extraction, I prefer lynx as noted in https://www.unix.com/shell-programmin...using-sed.html ... cheers, drl

Haha, I tend to lean towards regex and string manipulation too if the problem statement is simple. Just that by chance, the requirement by OP requires the inner text as well, hence my solution using n HTML parser.
There are lots of sayings that goes "HTML is not regular, so its difficult to parse HTML" such as Coding Horror: Parsing Html The Cthulhu Way for example.
I tend to agree, partly at least, since i know that if my requirement is simple, a regex will do. If not, then use a parser.

Thanks for introducing Regex Buddy. Its good to know that it can help with constructing regex, debugging etc..I will take a look at it someday.

On my side, if there is anything too complicated (wrt HTML parsing), i would still go for a HTML parser, its free anyway