Using sed to extract a substring in curly braces

Question

Currently, I got the line as below:

integration@ {Wed Nov 19 14:17:32 2014} branch: thebranch 

This is contained in the file, and I am parsing the line. However, I want the value between the brackets {Wed Nov 19 14:17:32 2014}

I have no experience with Sed, and to be honest, I find this a bit cryptic.

So far I have managed to use the following command, however the output is still a whole line.

What am I doing wrong?

 sed -e 's/[^/{]*"\([^/}]*\).*/\1/' 

Answer 1

To get values ​​that were between { , }

 $ sed 's/^[^{]*{\([^{}]*\)}.*/\1/' file Wed Nov 19 14:17:32 2014 

Answer 2

This is very easy to do with awk , without complicating the regex.

 awk -F"{|}" '{print $2}' file Wed Nov 19 14:17:32 2014 

It sets the field separator to { or } , then your data will be in the second field.

FS can be installed as follows:

 awk -F"[{}]" '{print $2}' file 

---

To see all fields:

 awk -F"{|}" '{print "field#1="$1"\nfield#2="$2"\nfield#3="$3}' file field# 1=integration@ field#2=Wed Nov 19 14:17:32 2014 field#3= branch: thebranch 

Answer 3

It can work

 sed -e 's/[^{]*\({[^}]*}\).*/\1/g' 

Test

 $ echo " integration@ {Wed Nov 19 14:17:32 2014} branch: thebranch" | sed -e 's/[^{]*{\([^}]*\)}.*/\1/g' 

Wed Nov 19 14:17:32 2014

Regex

• [^{]* Matches anything other than { , that is, integration@

• ([^}]*) Capture group 1

  • \{ Corresponds to {

  • [^}]* matches anything other than } , i.e. Wed Nov 19 14:17:32 2014

  • \} matches }

• .* matches the rest

Answer 4

Just below the command will also get the data ...

 echo " integration@ {Wed Nov 19 14:17:32 2014} branch: thebranch" | sed 's/.*{\(.*\)}.*/\1/g'