Question about grep

[awilki01]

I have parsed an HTML file to pull an IP address. The grep command I used was:

egrep '[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}' lab.html > mailmessage.txt

The output pulls the appropriate line out of the HTML file and looks like this:

<td class="datasmall">192.168.1.20</td>

I can live with this, but I would like to be able to parse out only the IP address and get rid of the other HTML tags on either side.

Is there an easy way to do this?

[khafa]

hi,


you can pipe it with awk as follows

egrep '[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}' lab.html| awk -F">" '{print $2}' | awk -F"<" '{print $1}'

there should a far better way to do this but im dead tired rite now to think

[scm]

Use sed to remove the HTML tags:

sed 's/<[^>]*>//g'

This removes all sequences of zero or more characters that are not '>' between '<' and '>' characters.

[awilki01]

Thanks! It worked! How about getting rid of leading space characters?

[scm]

Leading spaces can be removed by

sed 's/^ *//'

This matches zero or more occurrences (indicated by the * character) of space at the start of the line (indicated by the ^ character) and replaces them with nothing. If you replace the space character with a space and a tab enclosed in square brackets it'll cope with all leading whitespace.