Question

I am using grep to detect <a href="xxxx"> something here </a>
This is not working when the link is split on two lines in the input. I want to grep to check till it detects a </a> but right now it only is taking the input into grep till it detects a new line.

So if input is like <a href="xxxx"> something here </a> it works, but if input is like

<a href="xxxx">

something here /a>    

, then it doesn’t.
Any solutions?

Answer 1

I’d use awk rather than grep. This should work:

awk '/a href="xxxx">/,/\/a>/' filename