mjhjmtu

Not sure why I'm not getting this. I've been searching and testing my command for a couple hours and I'm not getting anywhere.

The text is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><result expand="changes,testResults,metadata,logEntries,plan,vcsRevisions,artifacts,comments,labels,jiraIssues" key="EP-ED-JOB1-174" state="Failed" lifeCycleState="Finished" number="174" ....

And I just want to pull out the ' state="Failed" ' part, it could also be ' state="Successful" '

I've tried a million variations of this:

sed '/state=".*"/p' htmlResponse.txt

But paren's, escape slashes etc seem to match the entire chunk of text. What's wrong with my regex?

Putting aside the obligatory "you should really be using a proper XML parser because regexes aren't powerful enough to parse XML" comment, I see two problems in your sed line:

1. 
   ".*" will match from the first " to the last, since . matches "
   


2. The sed command /.../p prints the whole line if it matches the regex.

Here's two things I'd suggest for quick-and-dirty HTML-scraping shell scripts:

1. Use "[^"]*" to match "quote, any number of non-quote characters, end quote"


2. It's lots easier to use grep -o to pull out bits of a file that match a regex

So that would make your command more like:

grep -o 'state="[^"]*"'

Or, if you really must use sed:

sed -n 's/.*(state="[^"]*").*/1/p'

The right way is to use XML parsers like xmlstarlet:

printf 'state="%s"n' $(xmlstarlet sel -t -v "//result/@state" -n htmlResponse.txt)

The output:

state="Failed"

You likely want to match the whole line and print just the matching group:

sed -r 's/.*state="([^"]*)".*/1/' htmlResponse.txt

That actually just pulls out the Failed or Successful (without including the state= part that precedes it), which I suspect is what you want. But if you do need that, you can add it back easily, or use a slightly different regex, as in wwoods's answer.

However, as Sundeep mentions, it is not at all robust to parse HTML (or XML) with a regular expression. It's one thing to use grep or sed to search for things interactively, but if this is part of a script that needs to carry out an important task and actually work, you should parse the XML properly.