mjhjmtu

I want to use echo "123|456|789" | sed 's/^(.*|)(.*|).*$/1'

I am trying to break the string and get the individual values (without the pipe |).

• Scenario 1: I want to get 123
  


• Scenario 2: I want to get 456
  


• Scenario 3: I want to get 789
  


• Scenario 4: I want to get 123 456 789
  

Since I am not sure what you want this to do, I will confine my answer to fixing the command. It should be:

echo "123|456|789" | sed 's/^(.|)(.|).*$/1/'

(note the / immediately before the last quote character).

This then gives the output:

123|

Is that what you wanted?

1. echo '123|456|789' | sed 's/|.*//'


2. echo '123|456|789' | sed 's/^[0-9]*|//;s/|.*//'


3. echo '123|456|789' | sed 's/.*|//'


4. echo '123|456|789' | sed 's/|/ /g'

Or if you're not precious about using sed

1. echo '123|456|789' | cut -f1 -d|


2. echo '123|456|789' | cut -f2 -d|


3. echo '123|456|789' | cut -f3 -d|


4. echo '123|456|789' | cut -f1,2,3 --output-delimiter=" " -d|

My previous answer just fixed an error. Here is the way I would actually solve it:

Scenario 4 is the most complicated, so here is the solution:

echo '123|456|789' | sed 's/([0-9]*)|([0-9]*)|([0-9]*)/1 2 3/'

The 1, 2 and 3 at the end select the part matched between the 'decorated brackets' ( the ( and ) ). Each set of those is referenced by the next number, so 1 for the first one, etc.

For scenarios 1, 2 and 3, you could simplify that, but its easier just to cut and paste, and then just have 1, 2 or 3 as required between the last set of //. It won't hurt to leave the rest of the decorated brackets in there.

This solution can be expanded to any number of fields, although I'd probably rather use cut if possible.

With GNU sed you can capture your fields by mentioning their number in shell var $n

n=2; # to get field number 2
echo "123|456|789" | sed -n "s/|/n/$n;s/^[^n]*|//;P"

while for scenario-4 is:

echo ... | sed -e 'y/|/ /'