Which regular expression should I use with the command grep if I wanted to match the text contained within the tag <div> and its closing tag </div> in an HTML file?
3 Answers
Here's one way using GNU grep:
grep -oP '(?<=<div> ).*?(?= </div>)' file If your tags span multiple lines, try:
< file tr -d '\n' | grep -oP '(?<=<div> ).*?(?= </div>)' You can do that by specifying a regex:
grep -E "^<div class=\"Message\">.*</div>$" input_files Not that this will only print the enclosures found on the same line. If your tag spans multiple lines, you can try:
tr '\n' ' ' < input_file | grep -E "^<div class=\"Message\">.*</div>$" You can't do it reliably with just grep. You need to parse the HTML with an HTML parser.
What if the HTML code has something like:
<!-- <div>blah blah</div> --> You'll get a false hit on that commented-out code. Here are some other examples where a regex-only option will fail you.
Consider using xmlgrep from the XML::Grep Perl module, as discussed here: Extract Title of a html file using grep
