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Asked: 2026-05-20T11:52:39+00:00

Trying to parse some spam injection out of a mysql export file, and for

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Trying to parse some spam injection out of a mysql export file, and for some reason this is not working:

sed 's|(<a href="http://[^"]*">[^<]*Buy[^<]*</a>)||g'

Which, imo, should match and remove:

<a href="http://basicpills.com/">Buy Generic Drugs Without Prescription</a>

but for some reason isn’t. I can do it in perl no prob, since that supports non-greedy matches, but it is so slow, and since I will probably have to do 7 or 8 passes to get all the different permutations it would be much better if I can get sed to work instead.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Do not forget -r to support extended regexp: sed -r 's|(<a href="http://[^"]*">[^<]*Buy[^<]*</a>)||g' or just remove the useless parenthesis (that should be \( and \) without -r)

    Are you sure that perl -p -e 's|<a href="http://[^"]*">[^<]*Buy[^<]*</a>||g' is really slower.

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