Question

I have this text file that have lines made in a certain format just like this next line

bla bla name1=WORD1 bla    bla name2=WORD2 bla bla name3=WORD2

I want to extract WORD1 WORD2 WORD3 without all the bla bla and printing them with semicolon

WORD1;WORD2;WORD3

can this be done using only sed ?

Answer 1

If WORD* always occur in this manner, you can use these two patterns [^=]*= and [^ ]* to match before and the word respectively. ^ at the beginning of a group inverts the matching. Something like this works in GNU sed:

sed -r 's/[^=]*=([^ ]*)[^=]*=([^ ]*)[^=]*=(.*)/\1;\2;\3/' infile