Question

I am using Ubuntu 10.10 and using Grep to process some HTML files.

Here is the HTML snippet:

<a href="video.php?video=one-hd.mov"><img src="/1.jpg"><a href="video.php?video=normal.mov"><img src="/2.jpg"><a href="video.php?video=another-hd.mov">

I would like to extract one-hd.mov and another-hd.mov but ignore normal.mov.

Here is my code:

example='<a href="video.php?video=one-hd.mov"><img src="/1.jpg"><a href="video.php?video=normal.mov"><img src="/2.jpg"><a href="video.php?video=another-hd.mov">'
echo $example | grep -Po '(?<=video.php\?video=).*?(?=-hd.mov">)'

The result is:

one
normal.mov"><img src="/2.jpg"><a href="video.php?video=another

But I want

one
another

There is a mismatch there.

Is this because of the so-called Greedy Regular Expression?

I am sing GREP but any command line bash tools are welcome to solve this problem like sed etc.

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

You want use Perl regexes for grep – why not directly perl?

echo "$example" | perl -nle 'm/.*?video.php\?video=([^"]+)">.*video.php\?video=([^"]+)".*/; print "=$1=$2="'

will print

=one-hd.mov=another-hd.mov=