Question

I have a line:

<random junk>TYPE=snp;<more random junk>

and I need to return everything between the end of TYPE= and the ; (in this case snp but it could be any of a number of text strings.

I tried various sed / awk solutions but I can’t seem to get it working. I have the feeling this is a simple problem so, sorry about that.

Answer 1

This seems to work:

sed 's/.*TYPE=\(.*\);.*/\1/'

EDIT:

Ah, so there can be semicolons in the random junk. Try this:

sed 's/.*TYPE=\([^;]*\);.*/\1/'