Hi,
This should work:
awk 'BEGIN { RS="href=\"" } { print $1 }' infile | sed -n 's/\(.*\)">.*/\1/p'
Used sed and awk to do this, there are probably more ways, but this came to mind first.
The problem is split in two. First, using awk, the whole input line is split up in parts that are easier to work with:
awk 'BEGIN {
RS="href=\"" } { print $1 }' infile
In (gnu) awk the seperator is not bound to one character, so the complete string
href=" is set to be record seperator (RS) and only the first field of that record is printed. Using your example input you will end up with 4 lines:
<br></span><a
/blah/blah2/folder/index.html">Name</a><span
/blah3/blah4/folder2/index.html">Name</a><span
/blah5/blah6/folder3/index.html">Name</a><span
Secondly, using sed, the part you are looking for is extracted and printed:
sed
-n 's/\(.*\)">.*/\1/
p'
The -n and the p make sure that only hits are printed. In this case the first line (<br></span><a) will not be printed.
sed -n 's/\(.*\)">.*/\1/p'
The search string looks for 2 things:
1) 'anything' (
.*)
2)
"> followed by 'anything' thats after the first hit.
The \( and \) are special, everything in between these can be represented by \1 in the replace string.
All this put together you'll end up with:
/blah/blah2/folder/index.html
/blah3/blah4/folder2/index.html
/blah5/blah6/folder3/index.html
Hope this helps.
