sed: group capturing

Question

Is there any way to tell sed to output only captured groups? for example given by input:

This is a sample 123 text and some 987 numbers

and pattern

/([\d]+)/

I could get only 123 and 987 output in the way formatted by back references perhaps?

Answer 1

Sed has up to nine remembered patterns but you need to use escaped parentheses to remember portions of the regular expression.

See here for examples and more detail

Answer 2

Try

sed -n -e "/[0-9]/s/^[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\).*$/\1 \2 \3 \4 \5 \6 \7 \8 \9/p"

I got this under cygwin:

$ (echo "asdf"; \
   echo "1234"; \
   echo "asdf1234adsf1234asdf"; \
   echo "1m2m3m4m5m6m7m8m9m0m1m2m3m4m5m6m7m8m9") | \
  sed -n -e "/[0-9]/s/^[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9]*\).*$/\1 \2 \3 \4 \5 \6 \7 \8 \9/p"

1234
1234 1234
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
$

Answer 3

you can use grep

grep -Eow "[0-9]+" file

Answer 4

The key to getting this to work is to tell sed to exclude what you don't want to be output as well as specifying what you do want.

string='This is a sample 123 text and some 987 numbers'
echo "$string" | sed -rn 's/[^[:digit:]]*([[:digit:]]+)[^[:digit:]]+([[:digit:]]+)[^[:digit:]]*/\1 \2/p'

This says:

• don't default to printing each line (-n)
• exclude zero or more non-digits
• include one or more digits
• exclude one or more non-digits
• include one or more digits
• exclude zero or more non-digits
• print the substitution (p)

Answer 5

I believe the pattern given in the question was by way of example only, and the goal was to match any pattern.

If you have a sed with the GNU extension allowing insertion of a newline in the pattern space, one suggestion is:

> set string = "This is a sample 123 text and some 987 numbers"
>
> set pattern = "[0-9][0-9]*"
> echo $string | sed "s/$pattern/\n&\n/g" | sed -n "/$pattern/p"
123
987
> set pattern = "[a-z][a-z]*"
> echo $string | sed "s/$pattern/\n&\n/g" | sed -n "/$pattern/p"
his
is
a
sample
text
and
some
numbers

These examples are with tcsh (yes, I know its the wrong shell) with CYGWIN. (Edit: For bash, remove set, and the spaces around =.)