Question

I have a feed.xml file that looks something like this. What I want to do is to grab the test.html from this feed.(Basically, the top most item’s url.) Any thoughts on how to do this?

<rss>
<item>
    <title>ABC</title>
    <url>
        test.html
    </url>
</item>
<item>
    <title>CDE</title>
    <url>
        test1.html
    </url>
</item>
</rss>

Thanks!

Answer 1

If the structure is fixed and you know that the URL has the postfix .html, you can simply do:

  cat <yourfile> | grep ".html" | head -n1

If you don’t know the postfix (or the string “html” can exist before), you can do:

 cat <yourfile> | grep -A1 "<url>" | head -n2 | tail -n1

EDIT
In case, the structure is not fixed (i.e., no newlines), there this

 cat <yourfile> | grep -o "<url>[^<]*</url>" | head -n1 | cut -d'>' -f2 | cut -d'<' -f1

or that

 cat <yourfile> | grep -o "<url>[^<]*</url>" | head -n1 | sed -E -e"s#<url>(.*)</url>#\1#"

may work.