Hello,

I am new to using sed and would like some help achieving this:

I need to delete everything after <br clear="all"> in a file. The full line that that is on looks like this:

Crevan</i></font></div></td></tr></table></div><br clear="all"><p><div id="fooled" class="subhead1">Have We Been Fooled?</div><span id="fooled2" class="subnav2">

I am trying to stay away from using head, tail, and cut to peice apart the file and put it back together. I was told to try to use sed, but dont have any experience with it. Can anyone help me please?!


Thanks!
farmerjoe

Hi,

This:

sed 's/\(.*br clear="all">\).*/\1/' infile

is one way of doing it.

A little breakdown of the command:

sed 's/\(.*br clear="all">\).*/\1/' infile
infile is the file that holds the lines you want to check (probably a html file in your case)

sed 's/\(.*br clear="all">\).*/\1/' infile
The search string looks for 2 things:
1) 'anything' (.*) followed by br clear="all">
2) 'anything' thats after the first hit.

The \( and \) are special, everything in between these can be represented by \1 in the replace string (sed 's/\(.*br clear="all">\).*/\1/' infile)

So the above code will print everything that's found between \( and \) and prints only that.

Hope this helps.

AHh! Thanks for your help and your helpful explanation. Would have taken me hours just to figure it out myself (i'm a little slow )

-farmerjoe