Question

Here’s a bash script that extracts some data from a html file.

price=`grep '        <td>\$' $1 | sed -e 's/<td>//g' -e 's:</td>::g' -e 's/\$ //g' -e 's/^  *//g'`
grep '        <td>\$' $1 | sed -e 's/<td>//g' -e 's:</td>::g' -e 's/\$ //g' -e 's/^  *//g'

echo "Price: $price"

The sed part could use some help, but that’s not the issue here. The problem is that, when I run the script, it should print the found value twice, right? But it prints it only once, the first time (Without the ‘Price:’). What’s the problem here?

Answer 1

The problem is that the string you’re returning has a \r in it, which returns the cursor to the first column before printing stuff out. Use od -c to verify. And use a proper tool such as xmlstarlet to make sure this doesn’t happen.