On 03/07/2011 12:23 PM, Robert Grasso wrote:
Hello,
On my opinion, grep is not powerful enough in order to achieve what you want. It would be preferable to use at least some (old but powerful) tools such sed, awk, or even better : perl. Actually, what you need is a tool providing a capture buffer (this is perl jargon - "back references" in sed jargon) in which you can get the string you want to extract, rather than trying to build up a positive matching regex, as the string boundaries seem to be easy enough to describe with regexs.
Thank you for your advice. After much fiddling I came up with something that seems to work. I have never dabbled with perl but will dig up my sed/awk book and see if there's a more elegant way to do this.
Regards, Patrick