How to extract text from a string using sed?

regex bash sed
RanRag picture RanRag · Jul 19, 2012 · Viewed 217.1k times · Source

My example string is as follows:

This is 02G05 a test string 20-Jul-2012

Now from the above string I want to extract 02G05. For that I tried the following regex with sed

$ echo "This is 02G05 a test string 20-Jul-2012" | sed -n '/\d+G\d+/p'

But the above command prints nothing and the reason I believe is it is not able to match anything against the pattern I supplied to sed.

So, my question is what am I doing wrong here and how to correct it.

When I try the above string and pattern with python I get my result

>>> re.findall(r'\d+G\d+',st)
['02G05']
>>>

Answer

mVChr picture mVChr · Jul 19, 2012

How about using grep -E?

echo "This is 02G05 a test string 20-Jul-2012" | grep -Eo '[0-9]+G[0-9]+'

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