CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexlinuxsed
Rahat Mahbub
Rahat Mahbub

Reputation: 2987

How to extract substring with sed but first occurence only?

Using sed -n "s/.*\(\/.*\/\).*/\1/p on /string1/string2 produces string1, as expected.

However, using the same on /string1/string2/string3 produces string2.

How can I print the first occurrence only, that is string1.

This does exactly what I wanted:

sed -n "s/[^/]*\(\/[a-z]*\).*/\1/p"

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1352

Answers (3)

potong
potong

Reputation: 58381

This might work for you (GNU sed):

sed -n 's/[^\/]*\(\/[^\/]*\/\).*/\1/p' file

Upvotes: 0

glenn jackman
glenn jackman

Reputation: 246774

perl's non-greedy regex quantifiers are handy:

perl -pe 's{.*?(/.*?/).*}{$1}' <<END
foobar/string1/string2/string3
END

/string1/

If you want to use bash shell:

str="foobar/string1/string2/string3"
string1=$( IFS=/; set -- $str; echo $2 )

Upvotes: 0

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 785058

You can use this sed:

sed -n 's|/\([^/]*\)/.*|\1|p'

Avoid escaping / by using an alternate delimiter.

Upvotes: 3

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