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I am trying to extract some info from a web page. Imagine you have a name given to you (Northcentral Siberia, Russia) and want to extract whole line containing this name from a web page. To handle this, I downloaded the web page (https://geofon.gfz-potsdam.de/eqinfo/list.php) into a text file using lynx command (lynx --dump "https://geofon.gfz-potsdam.de/eqinfo/list.php" > text.txt) and tried to grep the line containing the name "Northcentral Siberia, Russia". the following line shows the info in the web page which all are in a row:

2018-05-27 04:27:17 4.8 60.07°N 128.42°E    10  A       Northcentral Siberia, Russia

But when I downloaded the web page into a text file the above line breaks into two lines as follows:

2018-05-27 04:27:17 4.8 60.07°N 128.42°E    10  A   Northcentral 
Siberia, Russia

In this case, if I try to extract this line using its full name (Northcentral Siberia, Russia) and grep, it will fail. How can I deal with that?

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  • post the crucial raw fragment from the web page to process – RomanPerekhrest May 27 '18 at 16:47
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    Your question is worded unclearly.  You’re not talking about order, you’re talking about logical units of text being fragmented across lines. P.S. This problem is probably bigger than you realize. – G-Man May 27 '18 at 16:55
  • Sorry, English is not my nature language! I edited my question hope to be more clear – alireza niksejel May 27 '18 at 17:17
  • As it looks like that for me, does the location name contain a line break? In that case would it be possible to clean the data before writing the file or afterwards? – U880D May 27 '18 at 17:20
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    I don't think so! This case happens only for long lines. I added the web page link to be more clear ... – alireza niksejel May 27 '18 at 17:25
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It is because when you use the -dump option to lynx it assumes that your "screen" is 80 columns wide, and the table formatting, etc of the webpage causes that to wrap.

Add in a -width argument and it should work -

lynx -width=200 -dump "https://geofon.gfz-potsdam.de/eqinfo/list.php" > text.txt

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  • Many thanks for your solution. problem solved :) – alireza niksejel May 27 '18 at 20:17

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