Sed how to extract text between two tags but including it

Question

I am trying to figure out why this command is not working for me:

sed -n -e '/<a href=\(.*\)>/,/<\/a>/p' text.html

On text.html we have something like...

<somestupidstuff> <a href='teste'> teste </a> </somestupidstuff>

The desired output is:

<a href='teste'> teste </a>

But what I get is:

<somestupidstuff> <a href='teste'> teste </a> </somestupidstuff>

Maybe I am not fully understanding the regex.

Answer 1

It's much easier to use grep for your case. E.g. this way:

grep -o '<a href=[^<]*<\/a>'

In case there are < between <a href>..</a> you might want to try this instead:

grep -o '<a href=.*<\/a>'

However pay attention that it might return a data you don't expect for strings where you have multiple <a href=...</a> occurrences in the same string.

sed doesn't work for you because /pattern1/,/pattern2/p instructs sed to print all lines between line with pattern1 to line with pattern2 (including lines with patterns).

The problem might be solved with sed as well, but it depends on somestupidstuff content (e.g. whether it's the same in all cases or not, etc)