Grep data inside <body>*</body> only

tpubcom · 10-11-2009, 01:46 PM

Is there a way to use grep or any other command to only search for text inside the body tags of an html file? I don't want the data inside the title or any of the header tags to show up.

Thanks in advance.

Tinkster · 10-11-2009, 01:54 PM

Hi,

welcome to LQ ...

Something like this *should work* (untested).

Code:

sed -n '/<body>/,/<\/body>/p' file | grep "search string"

catkin · 10-11-2009, 02:23 PM

But a similar question was asked recently (sorry -- can't find it to give a link) and we came up with a few ingenious ways of doing it and then somebody sanely pointed out that HTML allows a lot of variation in formatting (for example, line ends are only token separators) and that automated editing was very much better done with specialist tools that are written to work with HTML syntax. Made a lot of sense.

Quick netsearch got this page. Might be some use.

chrism01 · 10-11-2009, 06:19 PM

As catkin said, a proper tool is recommended.
If you know Perl or don't mind learning it, this module may be the one you want;http://search.cpan.org/~gaas/HTML-Parser-3.62/Parser.pm