Question

I have “input.txt” and I want to search for a string and extract a string between quotes
my input.txt have only 2 lines :

name=' james carter'  nationality = ' usa '  age=32
name='fabio    rossi'  nationality = ' italia - milano '  age=19

I want the batch to extract the names (with spaces) from quotes and put them in variables (in this case only two variables is needed). For example I want to set two variables:

name= james carter
name=fabio    rossi

So I can use these variables in batch to do some future maniplation.

ps. its ok to use sed if necessary

edit

it seems to be impossible , so I wonder if can just take the string keeping quotes ,like this

name1=' james carter'
name2='fabio    rossi'

so the problem now is,to take what start after name=' and end with '

Answer 1

You can try this:

@echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
set "INPUT_FILE=input.txt"
set "SED_CMD=sed "s/name='\(.[^^']*\)'.*/\1/""
set i=0
for /f "usebackq tokens=*" %%a in (`findstr "name=" %INPUT_FILE%`) do (
    set /a i+=1
    for /f "usebackq tokens=*" %%v in (`echo %%a ^| %SED_CMD%`) do (
        echo %%v
    )
)

You will then have enumerated variables (name1, name2), etc. with the values you want.
Note that this works on any line with the specified form (i.e. name='something' blah blah).

EDIT: modified the code to discard lines that don’t contain the string name=.