mjhjmtu

I have a file: example here:

 <hello>TestFile</hello>
 <test>2018-04-30</test>
 <greetings>mycomputer</greetings>
 **<Iwanthis>6.1.0</Iwanthis>**
 <example>20180411</example>
 blah blah

I'm looking to grep the value (in this case 6.1.0) from between
6.1.0

is there an way to grep the file to grab the XXXX value?

regards

thanks all........

If you can trust that there will be one opening tag and one closing tag on that line, you can use this as field separator for awk:

awk -F "</*Iwanthis>" '(NF > 1)print $2' yourfile

This will fail on a lot of artificial cases. To be more strict, you could use sed:

sed -n 's_.*<Iwanthis>(.*)</Iwanthis>.*_1_p' yourfile

The -n suppresses default output, so you just get output on the matching line. I did chose the underscore as delimiter for the s command to avoid escaping the slash. The s command will replace the whole line by the part between the opening and closing tag (the 1 refers to the (.*) part)
Of course you can still create weird cases to make this fail.

Sure looks like an XML file. Add a root note and use an XML parser:

$ echo '<r>'; cat file; echo '</r>'; | xmlstarlet sel -t -v //Iwanthis
6.1.0