Can not extract the capture group with either sed or grep
RegexLinuxSedGrepRegex Problem Overview
I want to extract the value pair from a key-value pair syntax but I can not.
Example I tried:
echo employee_id=1234 | sed 's/employee_id=\([0-9]+\)/\1/g'
But this gives employee_id=1234 and not 1234 which is actually the capture group.
What am I doing wrong here? I also tried:
echo employee_id=1234| egrep -o employee_id=([0-9]+)
but no success.
Regex Solutions
Solution 1 - Regex
1. Use grep -Eo: (as egrep is deprecated)
echo 'employee_id=1234' | grep -Eo '[0-9]+'
1234
2. using grep -oP (PCRE):
echo 'employee_id=1234' | grep -oP 'employee_id=\K([0-9]+)'
1234
3. Using sed:
echo 'employee_id=1234' | sed 's/^.*employee_id=\([0-9][0-9]*\).*$/\1/'
1234
Solution 2 - Regex
To expand on anubhava's answer number 2, the general pattern to have grep return only the capture group is:
$ regex="$precedes_regex\K($capture_regex)(?=$follows_regex)"
$ echo $some_string | grep -oP "$regex"
so
# matches and returns b
$ echo "abc" | grep -oP "a\K(b)(?=c)"
b
# no match
$ echo "abc" | grep -oP "z\K(b)(?=c)"
# no match
$ echo "abc" | grep -oP "a\K(b)(?=d)"
Solution 3 - Regex
Using awk
echo 'employee_id=1234' | awk -F= '{print $2}'
1234
Solution 4 - Regex
use sed -E for extended regex
echo employee_id=1234 | sed -E 's/employee_id=([0-9]+)/\1/g'
Solution 5 - Regex
You are specifically asking for sed, but in case you may use something else - any POSIX-compliant shell can do parameter expansion which doesn't require a fork/subshell:
foo='employee_id=1234'
var=${foo%%=*}
value=${foo#*=}
$ echo "var=${var} value=${value}"
var=employee_id value=1234