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With sed I can extract data from an HTML file? For example like this:

<html>
...
<table>
<tr>
 <td>R1A</td><td>R1B</td>
 <td>R1C</td><td>R1D</td>
</tr>
<tr>
 <td>R2X</td><td>R2Y</td>
 <td>R2W</td><td>R2Z</td>
</tr>
</table>
....
</html>

Extract this output:

R1A R1B R1C R1D
R2X R2Y R2W R2Z

In my text editor I use the following regular expression:

/<tr>.*?<td>(.*?)</td>.*?<td>(.*?)</td>.*?<td>(.*?)</td>.*?<td>(.*?)</td>.*?</tr>/s
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This is not a do my work for me site. I could solve this easily but you haven't even bothered to make a polite question out of it. – Nifle Mar 7 '10 at 14:46
1  
This way madness lies: stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/… – Dennis Williamson Mar 7 '10 at 15:00
Politeness helps – fpmurphy Mar 7 '10 at 15:10
@Nifle: I understand. I was too direct. Sorry. – Sebtm Mar 7 '10 at 15:45
No need to all pile onto a new user. Politeness from old users helps, too. – JRobert Mar 8 '10 at 0:10
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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

Not a sed solution but an XSLT one

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" >
<xsl:output method="text" />

  <xsl:template match="//table/tr">
     <xsl:value-of select="descendant::td[1]"/>
     <xsl:text>  </xsl:text>
     <xsl:value-of select="descendant::td[2]"/>
     <xsl:text>  </xsl:text>
     <xsl:value-of select="descendant::td[3]"/>
     <xsl:text>  </xsl:text>
     <xsl:value-of select="descendant::td[4]"/>
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>
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But if HTML is malformed, this solution works? – Sebtm Mar 7 '10 at 15:48
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up vote 0 down vote

Use Microsoft Excel, it will capture it perfectly.

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