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Extract Bracketed Words

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# 1  
Old 04-26-2017
Extract Bracketed Words
Hi there, Unixers

I need to extract ALL the words from a text which aresurrounded by square brackets. I am using this piece of code

Code:
sed 's/.*\[\(.*\)\].*/\1/g' inputfile > outputfile

but I only get one word for every paragraph, why?


Moderator's Comments:
Mod Comment Please use CODE tags as required by forum rules!
Last edited by RudiC; 04-26-2017 at 06:17 PM.. Reason: Added CODE tags.
# 2  
Old 04-26-2017
Please become accustomed to provide decent context info of your problem.
It is always helpful to support a request with system info like OS and shell, related environment (variables, options), preferred tools, and adequate (representative) sample input and desired output data and the logics connecting the two, to avoid ambiguities and keep people from guessing.

Did you consider grep -o?
# 3  
Old 04-26-2017
This is because of greedy matching. The first .* in regular expression tries to match as much as possible, which is why your code will only find the last match on the line.

Instead you could try something like this, where the dot (any character) gets replaced by zero of more matches of "not a particular character" :

Try for example:
Code:
sed 's/[^[]*\[\([^]]*\)\][^[]*/\1 /g' file

This User Gave Thanks to Scrutinizer For This Post:
Don Cragun
# 4  
Old 04-27-2017
Yes...but...
Great solution. but could the output words be shown in new lines or separated by slashes. That would be great!!

Smilie
# 5  
Old 04-27-2017
Try:
Code:
sed 's,[^[]*\[\([^]]*\)\][^[]*,\1/,g
     s,/$,,' file

or, if you want to delete lines from the output for input lines that did not contain any words in square brackets:
Code:
sed -n 's,[^[]*\[\([^]]*\)\][^[]*,\1/,g
	s,/$,,p' file

This User Gave Thanks to Don Cragun For This Post:
eldeingles
# 6  
Old 04-27-2017
Just replace the space in the replacement part with the character of your choice.
One caveat is that GNU sed understands \n , but regular sed needs a hard newline.
GNY sed:
Code:
sed 's/[^[]*\[\([^]]*\)\][^[]*/\1\n/g' file

regular sed.
Code:
sed 's/[^[]*\[\([^]]*\)\][^[]*/\
/g' file

--
If you have GNU sed then you will also have GNU grep which has the -o option as RudiC suggested but it leaves the square brackets:

Code:
grep -o '\[[^]]*]' file

--
Another alternative is awk:
Code:
awk 'NF>1{print $1}' RS=\[ FS=\] file

This User Gave Thanks to Scrutinizer For This Post:
eldeingles
# 7  
Old 04-27-2017
Don, You Got It
Thanks done, perfect piece of code. Saved me headaches! Smilie

---------- Post updated at 02:10 AM ---------- Previous update was at 02:06 AM ----------

Yeah, thanks too Scrutinizer... This one worked fine.

Code:
awk 'NF>1{print $1}' RS=\[ FS=\] file

Smilie
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