Question

How would I remove the anchor tag but keep the anchor text in Bash? So I want to remove everything except the words Example text.

<a href="http://example.com">Example text</a>

So if I do:

echo '<a href="http://example.com">Example text</a>' | sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g'

That removes all HTML. I’m looking to remove just anchor tags but also retain the anchor text, “Example text” in this case.

Answer 1

You could use the following command:

$ echo '<a href="http://example.com">Example text</a>' | sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g'
Example text

Or, alternatively, you could also use perl instead of sed since a non greedy regular expression would be helpful here:

$ echo '<a href="http://example.com">Example text</a>' | perl -pe 's/\<.*?\>//g'
Example text

Note: Using regex to parse HTML is discouraged, but for this small task I’d say it’s fine to stick to the tools available in the command line.

Edit: To remove just anchor tags, you can use the regular expression can be updated as follows:

sed -e 's/<\/\?a\s*[^>]*>//g'