Question

I was asked today to list all image files references in our project to help remove/fix dead references.

All our image names in the source files are enclosed in either simple or double quotes ('image.png' or "image.png").

To extract those I thought of using grep, sed an other tools like that but so fair I failed to come up with something effective.

I can currently list all lines that contain image names by grepping the image file extensions (.png, .gif, and so on) but that also brings lines completely unrelated to my search. My attempt with sed wasn’t working in case there was several strings per line.

I could probably filter out the list by myself, but hey: this is linux ! So there has to be a tool for the job.

How would you do that ?

Answer 1

You should be able to extract the file names with something like this:

grep -Eo "['\"][^'\"]*\.(gif|png)['\"]"

The option -o causes grep to list only the matches instead of the whole line. Use tr to remove the quotes:

grep -Eo "['\"][^'\"]*\.(gif|png)['\"]" | tr -d "\"'"