Grep for everything between two tags?

[Jerry Nilson]

Hi,

Cannot figure out (new to this) how to write a grep search to match:

        <description><![CDATA[data1: 2820<br>data2 (m): <br>data3: word word<br>data4: XX-7-3056<br>data5:<br>data1: 2820<br>data2 (m): <br>data3: word word<br>data4: XX-7-3056<br>data5: ]]></description>

Where I want to substitute all similar lines with:

        <description></description>

Thought I could write:

        <description>.*</description>

or possibly with a ? after, but seems I may need more escape characters here because some of the characters to be deleted are also grep characters? Tried witch escapes too, but cannot get it quite right apparently ... .

All the best,

Jerry

[Sam Hathaway]

<description>.*?</description> worked for me with your sample line.
-sam

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[Jerry Nilson]

You are right! 😃 I bloody well tried exactly that too, but maybe I had not selected the whole row when applying to "selected text" only (as I did not see the full row on my computer ...). Now it of course worked right away! Tried to fix a kmz file exported from a Google map, that mishandles the code when exporting if one has added extra columns of data (now found out I could have deleted the columns on the map before exporting .... oh well, but need this anyway as they will add this column back despite that they should not (should not do that with info one has not entered in that column as it is, but ...)).

Thanks – need to learn more Grep ... !

Jerry

[Patrick Woolsey]

One potential catch here is that by default the . metacharacter
doesn't match past hard line breaks, so if the desired data
spans one or more lines, a pattern like this:

Find: <description>.*</description>

won't work.

You can however modify this behavior by pre-pending the pattern
modifier (?s), and then for insurance adding a ? to prevent the
match from being 'greedy', making a search pattern:

Find: <description>(?s).*?</description>

so please give that a try. :-)


Regards,



Patrick Woolsey

==

Bare Bones Software, Inc. <http://www.barebones.com/>

[Jerry Nilson]

Thanks!