Hello,
I am trying to put together a series of sctipts to work for me and I have been stuck on this one for some time now. I need a command or serries of commands that will pull an e-mail address out of an html file.

grep "mailto:" file.html
#gives me this output

<td width="275"><font size="2" color="#000000"face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">pappy paperson<BR>29 smith<BR>Irvine, CA 92620<BR>US<BR><a href="mailtoappy@pappy.com" style=" ">pappy@pappy.com</a><BR></font></td>


I would like to narrow this down to only read the actual e-mail address to drop into a new file. I have limited C++ knowledge from windows but have never been able to convert my program to linux. Any help that you could offer would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

if you're on a linux box, do a man on grep and learn about regular expression, it will limit it down to exactly what you need. maybe something like

cat html | grep ^mailto:[a-zA-Z0-9@]+'.'com$

do a google on regular expression, you will find a lot of good and clear explainations, the one example i gave might not be exactly right, but it's supposed to find everything that starts with "mailto:" and end with ".com"

You need a regexp to extract the substring you want, this might work:

MAIL=$(grep "mailto:" file.html)
expr "$MAIL" : '.*mailto\:\(.*\)\" s.*' >mail.txt

Thanks for your help, I got what I was looking for.