How can I get an unknown substring with an regular expression? I know what’s before and after the wanted string but I don’t want the known part with in the result.
Example text:
jhgjgjgvocher_SOMETHINGHERE.dbhjjkghjkg vocher_SOMETHINGELSE.db
I’m looking for ‘SOMETHINGHERE’ and ‘SOMETHINGELSE’ only.
vocher_ and .db are always before and after the relevant part but should not be in the result.
A working solution is:
cat test | egrep -o "vocher_.*.db" | cut -d "_" -f2 | cut -d "." -f1
… but you know it’s ugly.
Is it possible to search exactly for an unknown part with regex (in this case only the .* part), or do I need to use something like sed? Is there a better solution?
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Answer
A simple solution using perl is the following:
perl -ne 'if (/vocher_(.*).db/){ print "$1n";}' test_file.txt
This iterates line-by-line over the file and only prints the desired portion.