CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxstringbashposixtrim
Tommaso Thea
Tommaso Thea

Reputation: 614

Trimming string up to certain characters in Bash

I'm trying to make a bash script that will tell me the latest stable version of the Linux kernel.

The problem is that, while I can remove everything after certain characters, I don't seem to be able to delete everything prior to certain characters.

#!/bin/bash

wget=$(wget --output-document - --quiet www.kernel.org | \grep -A 1 "latest_link")

wget=${wget##.tar.xz\">}

wget=${wget%</a>}

echo "${wget}"

Somehow the output "ignores" the wget=${wget##.tar.xz\">} line.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 704

Answers (4)

Benjamin W.
Benjamin W.

Reputation: 52122

You're trying remove the longest match of the pattern .tar.xz\"> from the beginning of the string, but your string doesn't start with .tar.xz, so there is no match.

You have to use

wget=${wget##*.tar.xz\">}

Then, because you're in a script and not an interactive shell, there shouldn't be any need to escape \grep (presumably to prevent usage of an alias), as aliases are disabled in non-interactive shells.

And, as pointed out, naming a variable the same as an existing command (often found: test) is bound to lead to confusion.

If you want to use command line tools designed to deal with HTML, you could have a look at the W3C HTML-XML-utils (Ubuntu: apt install html-xml-utils). Using them, you could get the info you want as follows:

$ curl -sL www.kernel.org | hxselect 'td#latest_link' | hxextract a -
4.10.8

Or, in detail:

curl -sL www.kernel.org |     # Fetch page
hxselect 'td#latest_link' |   # Select td element with ID "latest_link"
hxextract a -                 # Extract link text ("-" for standard input)

Upvotes: 2

agc
agc

Reputation: 8406

sed method:

wget --output-document - --quiet www.kernel.org | \
  sed -n '/latest_link/{n;s/^.*">//;s/<.*//p}'

Output:

4.10.8

Upvotes: 0

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 785058

It is not recommended to use shell tools grep, awk, sed etc to parse HTML files.

However if you want a quick one liner then this awk should do the job:

get --output-document - --quiet www.kernel.org |
awk '/"latest_link"/ { getline; n=split($0, a, /[<>]/); print a[n-2] }'

4.10.8

Upvotes: 0

Scott MacEwan
Scott MacEwan

Reputation: 11

Whenever I need to extract a substring in bash I always see if I can brute force it in a couple of cut(1) commands. In your case, the following appears to work:

wget=$(wget --output-document - --quiet www.kernel.org | \grep -A 1 "latest_link")
echo $wget | cut -d'>' -f3 | cut -d'<' -f1

I'm certain there's a more elegant way, but this has simple syntax that I never forget. Note that it will break if 'wget' gets extra ">" or "<" characters in the future.

Upvotes: 1

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