Grep a line which start and end with a pre defined character

I am trying to fetch a line from a file file.txt which looks like this:

>This is line 1.</li> >This is line 2.</li> >This is line 3.</li> >This is line 4.</li> 

I need to fetch content which starts with > and ends in </li> so the output will be This is line 1. This is line 2. and so on. I have looked into this in forum but didnt found solution. This solution also didnt worked.

I ultimately have to fetch some lines from a webpage. So first I will curl webpage and then use grep command to grep that line which starts with > and ends in </li>.

Thanks.!

2 Answers

This should be enough:

grep '^>.*</li>$' input-file 

The ^ and $ ensure that those parts are anchored at the start and end of the lines respectively.

You can also do:

grep -x '>.*</li>' input-file 

-x looks for an exact match: the whole line should match the pattern (which implies ^ and $ is wrapped around the pattern).

This is the input file:

$ cat /tmp/tmp.txt >This is line 1.</li> invalid line 1 >This is line 2.</li> >This is line 3.</li> invalid line 2 >This is line 4.</li> last invalid line 

Using grep and awk to extract the strings you want:

$ cat /tmp/tmp.txt | grep -E '>*</li>' | awk -F\> '{ print $2 }' | awk -F\< '{ print $1 }' This is line 1. This is line 2. This is line 3. This is line 4.