html - hyperlink and link text extraction - regex

Question

Hi I'm trying to extract the hyperlink and link text
HTML
<tr valign="top">
<td class="beginner">
B03
</td>
<td>
Simple Symmetry </td>
</tr>
<tr valign="top">
<td class="beginner">
B04
</td>
<td>
Faces and a Vase </td>
</tr>
<tr valign="top">
<td class="beginner">
B05
</td>
<td>
Blind Contour Drawing </td>
</tr>
<tr valign="top">
<td class="beginner">
B06
</td>
<td>
Seeing Values </td>
</tr>
Code
sed -n 's/.*href="\([^"]*\).*/\1/p' file
http://www.drawspace.com/lessons/b03/simple-symmetry
http://www.drawspace.com/lessons/b04/faces-and-a-vase
http://www.drawspace.com/lessons/b05/blind-contour-drawing
http://www.drawspace.com/lessons/b06/seeing-values
Desired
http://www.drawspace.com/lessons/b03/simple-symmetry Simple Symmetry
http://www.drawspace.com/lessons/b04/faces-and-a-vase Faces and a Vase
http://www.drawspace.com/lessons/b05/blind-contour-drawing Blind Contour Drawing
http://www.drawspace.com/lessons/b06/seeing-values Seeing Values

Answer 1

1st solution: With your shown samples please try following awk code. Written and tested in GNU awk. Simple explanation would be setting RS to <a href="[^"]*">[^<]* regex and in main program, checking if RT is NOT NULL and using split to split its value into array arr with delmiter of > OR ", if all conditions are met then simply printing 2nd and 4th values of array arr as per requirement to get needed output.
awk -v RS='<a href="[^"]*">[^<]*' '
RT && split(RT,arr,"[>\"]"){
print arr[2],arr[4]
}
' Input_file
2nd solution: Using sed with its -E option(to enable ERE, extended regular expressions) please try following code. Using -n option to stop default writing by sed for lines. Then in main program using s option to perform substitution operation. Where I am mentioning [[:space:]]+<a href="([^"]*)">([^<]*).* regex which will create 2 capturing groups from which we are substituting whole matched text and then using p option to print this matched part as per requirement.
sed -E -n 's/[[:space:]]+<a href="([^"]*)">([^<]*).*/\1 \2/p' Input_file
3rd solution: Using GNU awk's match function where mentioning regex and creating 2 capturing group to fetch the required value(s).
awk '
match($0,/^[[:space:]]+<a href="([^"]*)">([^<]*)/,arr){
print arr[1],arr[2]
}
' Input_file