CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxparsingsedgrep
Roman Iuvshin
Roman Iuvshin

Reputation: 1912

Parsing string with grep

I need some help with parsing a string in Linux.

I have a string:

[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds

and want to get only

2 minutes 8 seconds

Upvotes: 1

Views: 33722

Answers (6)

Shifu
Shifu

Reputation: 1

If you are getting the info from the terminal then you can grep out the info and use cut with the delimiter to remove everything before the info you want. grep INFO | cut -f2 -d:

If you want the info out of a file then you can grep the file grep INFO somefilename | cut -f2 -d:

Upvotes: 0

jaypal singh
jaypal singh

Reputation: 77075

If you prefer AWK then it is quite simple

echo "[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds" | awk -F": " '{ print $2 }'

Upvotes: 1

johnsyweb
johnsyweb

Reputation: 141770

Using grep:

$ echo '[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds' | grep -o '[[:digit:]].*$'
2 minutes 8 seconds

Or sed:

$ echo '[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds' | sed 's/.*: //'
2 minutes 8 seconds

Or awk:

$ echo '[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds' | awk -F': ' '{print $2}'
2 minutes 8 seconds

Or cut:

$ echo '[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds' | cut -d: -f2
 2 minutes 8 seconds

And then read sed & awk, Second Edition.

Upvotes: 10

sehe
sehe

Reputation: 392833

The sed and perl options do work, but in this trivial case, I'd prefer

 echo "[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds" | cut -d: -f2

If you have something against spaces, you can just use 

 echo "[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds" | cut -d: -f2 | xargs

or even...

 echo "[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds" | cut -d: -f2 | cut -c2-

PS. Trivia: you could do this with grep only if grep implemented positive lookbehind like this egrep -o '(?<=: ).*'; Unfortunately neither POSIX extended regex nor GNU extended regex implement lookbehind (http://www.regular-expressions.info/refflavors.html)

Upvotes: 7

yko
yko

Reputation: 2710

Use sed or perl:

echo "[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds" | sed -e 's/^\[INFO\] Total time:\s*//'
echo "[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds" | perl -pe "s/^\[INFO\] Total time:\s*//;"

Upvotes: 0

knittl
knittl

Reputation: 265131

If the line prefix is always the same, simply use sed and replace the prefix with an empty string:

sed 's/\[INFO\] Total Time: //'

Assuming that the time is always the last thing in a line after a colon, use the following regex (replace each line with everything after the colon):

sed 's/^.*: \(.*\)$/\1/'

Upvotes: 5

Related Questions