Question

I am trying to get text from a html page in shell, as part of a script to show me the temperature in my local area.

I however can’t get my head around how to use grep properly

Excerpt from web page

</div><div id="yw-forecast" class="night" style="height:auto"><em>Current conditions as of 8:18 PM GMT</em><div id="yw-cond">Light Rain Shower</div><dl><dt>Feels Like:</dt><dd>6 &deg;C</dd><dt>Barometer:</dt><dd style="position:relative;">1,015.92 mb and steady</dd><dt>Humidity:</dt><dd>87 %</dd><dt>Visibility:</dt><dd>9.99 km</dd><dt>Dewpoint

Except shorter cut down further

<dt>Feels Like:</dt><dd>6 &deg;C</dd>

Trying to grab the 6 °C

I have tried a variety of different tactics, including grep and awk. Can a shell wizard help me out?

Answer 1

Try

grep -o -e "<dd>.*deg;C</dd>" the_html.txt

From the man page:

-e PATTERN, --regexp=PATTERN
      Use PATTERN as  the  pattern.   This  can  be  used  to  specify
      multiple search patterns, or to protect a pattern beginning with
      a hyphen (-).  (-e is specified by POSIX.)

...

-o, --only-matching
      Print only the matched (non-empty) parts  of  a  matching  line,
      with each such part on a separate output line.

---

If you want to get rid of <dd> and </dd> too, just append | cut -b 5-12.