I want to pluck the title out of articles in 'Annals of Internal Medicine'. The titles appear in lines such as:

They recently introduced the alternate title, often a repeat of the
'main' title, sometimes a shortened version. Before that I could grep
on ctl00_scm6MainContent_lblArticleTitle and strip the html tags.

To address this complication I changed the algorithm to:

which didn't work: it still returned both titles.

My problem is that

works outside of `` . The 'sed' statement isn't working the same inside of them.

I've missed something basic. I've used this maneuver before.

you will see it returns the "main" title and the alternate title together. I think it will do the same thing with and without backticks. Try this:

It doesn't work the same inside the back-ticks as it does outside, at least not on my computer. That's the question I wanted answered. I've already found another tactic to solve this particular problem.

Your suggestion doesn't work: the relevant field varies between files.

one more comment to it:
\ may not be evaluated properly, but you can try to use $( command ) instead of ` command `. That may solve that issue

nvm, not used to seeing sed used with multiple functions.

The `` is deprecated, you might see if $() gives the expected result.