Extract strings from between tags and save to new text file

Question

I need to extract text strings from a file and put them in a new file. Each string is always between the same text (tags).

Here's an example (there are hundreds of blocks like this one where I need the data from to be put into one file):

1731 0 obj
<</Page 250/Type/Annot/Subtype/Highlight/Rotate 0/Rect[ 95.4715 347.644 337.068 362.041]/NM(929cd95c-f962-4fa3-b734-2e0e67d7b321)/T(iPad)/CreationDate(D:20160818145053Z00'00')/M(D:20160818145204Z00'00')/C[ 0.454902 0.501961 0.988235]/CA 1/QuadPoints[ 95.4715 362.041 337.068 362.041 95.4715 347.644 337.068 347.644]/Contents(EXAMPLE OF TEXT TO BE EXTRACTED)/F 4/Subj(Highlight)>>
endobj

I need to extract Page 250 and EXAMPLE OF TEXT TO BE EXTRACTED

For the Page 250 example, the relevant tags seem to be:

<</

and

/Type

For the EXAMPLE OF TEXT TO BE EXTRACTED example, the relevant tags seem to be:

/Contents(

and

)/F

Eventually I would like the pages and the corresponding text to be sorted in ascending order, but I could manage that in a spreadsheet.

I tried to use some answers from here, but I did not manage to make it work...

I am most confortable with Unix command line, but I know a little bit of Python and AppleScript

Answer 1

With awk:

awk -F/ '$1=="<<" {i=$2; for(j=3;j<=NF;j++) \
         if($j~/^Contents/) split($j,a,"[()]"); print i " _ " a[2]}' file.txt

• Setting the field separator as /, if the first field is <<, then saving the second field as variable i to be printed later

• Iterating over the rest of the fields and if any field starts with Contents, then splitting the field on () to create array a, for(j=3;j<=NF;j++) if($j~/^Contents/) split($j,a,"[()]")

• printing the variable i and second element of array a separating them by _

Example:

% cat file.txt                                                                                                        
1731 0 obj
<</Page 250/Type/Annot/Subtype/Highlight/Rotate 0/Rect[ 95.4715 347.644 337.068 362.041]/NM(929cd95c-f962-4fa3-b734-2e0e67d7b321)/T(iPad)/CreationDate(D:20160818145053Z00'00')/M(D:20160818145204Z00'00')/C[ 0.454902 0.501961 0.988235]/CA 1/QuadPoints[ 95.4715 362.041 337.068 362.041 95.4715 347.644 337.068 347.644]/Contents(EXAMPLE OF TEXT TO BE EXTRACTED)/F 4/Subj(Highlight)>>
endobj

% awk -F/ '$1=="<<" {i=$2; for(j=3;j<=NF;j++) if($j~/^Contents/) split($j,a,"[()]"); print i " _ " a[2]}' file.txt
Page 250 _ EXAMPLE OF TEXT TO BE EXTRACTED

Answer 2

I added your example content to a disk file named file and then show the contents of file using the cat command. Then using awk on file I essentially strip out the parts you're callings tags and printed out the two pieces of data in a tab delimited format. Is this what you're looking for?

$ cat file
1731 0 obj
<</Page 250/Type/Annot/Subtype/Highlight/Rotate 0/Rect[ 95.4715 347.644 337.068 362.041]/NM(929cd95c-f962-4fa3-b734-2e0e67d7b321)/T(iPad)/CreationDate(D:20160818145053Z00'00')/M(D:20160818145204Z00'00')/C[ 0.454902 0.501961 0.988235]/CA 1/QuadPoints[ 95.4715 362.041 337.068 362.041 95.4715 347.644 337.068 347.644]/Contents(EXAMPLE OF TEXT TO BE EXTRACTED)/F 4/Subj(Highlight)>>
endobj
$ awk '{sub(/\<\<\//, "")};{sub(/\/Type.*\/Contents\(/, "\t")};{sub(/\)\/F.*$/, "")};/Page [0-9]/{print}' file
Page 250    EXAMPLE OF TEXT TO BE EXTRACTED
$

What the awk program is doing:

• /Page [0-9]/ is searching for lines that contain, i.e., 'Page' a space, followed by a number, e.g.,Page 250. I'm assuming that EXAMPLE OF TEXT TO BE EXTRACTED will not contain that pattern. Not that I think it matters although the code can be easily modified to accommodate that.

• sub(/\<\<\//, "") strips: <</

• sub(/\/Type.*\/Contents\(/, "\t") is replacing everything between /Type and /Contents( with a tab.
• sub(/\)\/F.*$/, "") is stripping everything from )/F to the end of the line.

So what's left is what's printed out. The two pieces of wanted data separated by a tab.

I know this doesn't cover all aspects you mentioned, however your other requirements are not clear enough. Is it just one file your need to process or multiplied files. In either case, do you want all extracted data into a single file and the data sorted how exactly, etc.

So if you could clarify things I could probably write a bash script to cover it.

Obviously with the awk program I've provided, you can just redirect the output to an outfile and continue to process it with the sort command. awk can do sorting too however getting the target data in one command line was what I could offer with awk, at this point.