UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Can anyone help with my string editing problem?

I need write a ksh script to extract a sub-string from a longer string. The sub-string will start wih the characters SPC and end with the ) character but I don't know in advance where in the main string these characters will appear or how long the string and sub-string are. But I do know that SPC and ) will only appear once in the string.
For example, the followng string is stored in variable PARMSTRING:
"abcSPCblah, blah, blah)more text"
so I need to strip "abc" and "more text" from PARMSTRING leaving PARMSTRING equal to "SPCblah, blah, blah)".

Thanks in advance for any advice on this problem.

Much easier with sed.

Code:

sed -n -e "s/.*\(SPC[^)]*)\).*/\1/p" input.txt

Fantastic ! This works a treat. Just one more question. How do I get sed to use the value of a a variable in my script as the input string instead of a string in another file? The input string has been read in from std input.

Code:

input=$1
outVariable=$(echo "$input" | sed -n -e "s/.*\(SPC[^)]*)\).*/\1/p")

$1 is the first argument read from std.

Vino,

Thanks for your swift response to my questions. You've saved me a lot of time figuring out how to do this.