Question

I’m trying to get a substring from the start of a pattern.

I would simply use cut, but it wouldn’t work if the pattern is a few characters long.

if I needed a single-character, delimiter, then this would do the trick:

result=`echo "test String with ( element in parenthesis ) end" | cut -d "(" -f 2-`

edit: sample tests:

 INPUT: ("This test String is an input", "in")
 OUTPUT: "ing is an input"

 INPUT: ("This test string is an input", "in ")
 OUTPUT: ""

 INPUT: ("This test string is an input", "n")
 OUTPUT: "ng is an input"

note: the parenthesis mean that the input both takes a string, and a delimiter string.

Answer 1

EDITED:

In conclusion, what was requested was a way to parse out the text from a string beginning at a particular substring and ending at the end of the line. As mentioned, there are numerous ways to do this. Here’s one…

egrep -o "DELIM.*" input

… where ‘DELIM’ is the desired substring.