HowTo: grep Text Between Two Words in Unix / Linux

Author: Vivek Gite Last updated: August 12, 2012 12 comments

I got over 100s of HTML files in the following format:

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<HTML>
<HEAD>
 <TITLE>Statistics for ABC LTD - January 2007 - Rang IDXYZZAZZZZ</TITLE>
</HEAD>
 
<BODY BGCOLOR="#E8E8E8" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#0000FF" VLINK="#FF0000">
<H2>Statistics for ABC LTF</H2>
<SMALL><STRONG>
Summary Period: January 2007<BR>
Generated 01-Feb-2007 06:40 CET<BR>
</STRONG></SMALL>
<CENTER>
<HR>
<P>
<FONT SIZE="-1"></CENTER><PRE>
 
my data 1
my data 2
my data 3
my data 10000
my data N times

Generated by MyAppDbStatsWriter (UNIX) version 1.9b2

How do I extract text between two words (<PRE> and </PRE>) in unix or linux using grep command?

The grep command is not suitable for this kind of work. I suggest that you use sed command. The syntax is:

sed -n "/START-WORD-HERE/,/END-WORD-HERE/p" input
sed -n "/START-WORD-HERE/,/END-WORD-HERE/p" input > output

In this example, extract text between two <PRE> and </PRE> using sed commmand:

sed -n "/<PRE>/,/<\/PRE>/p" input.html
sed -n "/<PRE>/,/<\/PRE>/p" input.html > output.html

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12 comments… add one

Arash Aug 12, 2012 @ 16:27
Easy and practical, thanks.
I just wanted to know is it possible to use `awk` instead of `sed` ?
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- 🐧 nixCraft Aug 12, 2012 @ 21:41
```
awk '/WORD1/,/WORD2/' /path/to/file
awk '/<PRE>/,/<\/PRE>/' /path/to/file
awk '/<PRE>/,/<\/PRE>/' /path/to/file > output.file
```
  Reply Link
Surya Dec 2, 2012 @ 8:34
Thanks for a simple & elegant solution. But it prints START-WORD & END-WORD as well. Is there a simple way to exclude these, by including something simple like \zs or \ze (of ViM) in the START-WORD & END-WORD?
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jwhendy May 20, 2013 @ 23:28
I have the same inquiry as Surya — how do you omit the start and end regexp’s?
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SSengupta Jan 28, 2014 @ 12:31
Replace the words START-WORD & END-WORD with your keyword.
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billy Feb 13, 2014 @ 13:17
Whenever I use the sed or awk version of
/word1/,/word2/
say i have a file
word1 and word2
it prints
word1 and word2
and not just
and
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jwhendy Feb 13, 2014 @ 21:23
@SSengupta: I don’t think you understand the question that Surya, myself, and now billy have asked. Conduct the example above:
– copy the example html into a file, input.html
– execute the sed command to “extract the text between `pre` and `/pre`”
– You end up with “
```
the text
```
”
For something where this is just one “chunk” and you can just remove on set of `pre` and `/pre` matches, not a big deal. But I was doing this on a big file with tons of matches and thus keeping the “bookend” text really doesn’t help me much.
A workaround is to do the `sed` command above, and then go back through with two other steps:
– sed -i “s/
```
//g” output.html
– set -i “s,
```
,,g” output.html
(Use commas for second command since typical separator, “/” is used in the closing pre tag)
Reply Link
jwhendy Feb 13, 2014 @ 21:27
Yeah, that went horribly… Trying once more:
—–
@SSengupta: I don’t think you understand the question that Surya, myself, and now billy have asked. Conduct the example above:
– copy the example html into a file, input.html
– execute the sed command to extract the text between `pre` and `/pre`
– you end up with both the pre tags *and* the text in between
For something where this is just one chunk and you can just remove one set of `pre` and `/pre` matches, not a big deal. But I was doing this on a big file with tons of matches and thus keeping the “bookend” text really doesn’t help me much.
A workaround is to do the `sed` command above, and then go back through with two other steps:
```
sed -i "s/
```
```
//g" output.html
set -i "s,
```
,,g" output.html
(Use commas for second command since typical separator, “/” is used in the closing pre tag).
Reply Link
jwhendy Feb 13, 2014 @ 21:33
You get the idea… just manually sed the pre tags out afterward. Sorry, huge comment fail…
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Andi F. Jul 12, 2016 @ 19:00
In contrast to what is stated in this article, grep is actually a perfect tool for this job! It supports both positive and negative look-ahead and look-back. To extract text from in between HTML tags, for example:
```
 grep -iPo '(?<=)(.*)(?=)'
```
Now. I don’t know if it’s faster than sed or awk, but it works! :-)
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- Andi F. Jul 12, 2016 @ 19:01
  It seems my code was interpreted as HTML and not fully displayed. I really don’t know a way around that, so never mind, I guess.
  Reply Link
  - 🐧 Vivek Gite Jul 12, 2016 @ 19:19
    Put it between pre html tags.
    Reply Link