Pass sed output to mv - regex

Question

I'm trying to batch rename text files according to a string they contain.
I used sed to isolate the pattern with \( and \) as I couldn't get this to work in grep.
sed -i '' 's/<title>\(.*\)<\/title>/&/g' *.txt | mv *.txt $sed.txt
(the text I want to use as filename is between html title tags)`
Where I wrote $sed would be the output of sed.
hope that's clear!

Answer 1

A simple loop in bash can accomplish this. If each file is valid HTML, meaning you have only one <title> tag in the file, you can rename them all this way:
for file in *.txt; do
mv "$file" `sed -n 's/<title>\([^<]*\)<\/title>/\1/p;' $file| sed -e 's/[ ][ ]*/_/g'`.txt
done
So, if you have files 1.txt, 2.txt and 3.txt, each with cat, dog and my hippo in their TITLE tags, you'll end up with cat.txt, dog.txt and my_hippo.txt after the above loop.
EDIT: quoted initial $file in case there are spaces in filenames; and added a second sed to convert any spaces in the <title> tag to _'s in resulting filenames. NOTE the whitespace inside the []'s in the second sed command is a literal space and tab character.

Answer 2

You can enclose expression in grave accent characters (`) to make it insert its output to the place you want. Try:
mv *.txt `sed -i '' 's/<title>\(.*\)<\/title>/&/g' *.txt`.txt
It is rather not flexible, but should work.
(I haven't used it in a while and cannot test it now, so I might be wrong).

Answer 3

Here is the command I would use:
for i in *.txt ; do
sed "s=<title>\(.*\)</title>=mv '$i' '\1'=e" $i
done
The sed substitution search for pattern in each one of your .txt files. For each file it creates string mv 'file_name' 'found_pattern'.
With the e command at the end of sed commands, this resulting string is directly executed in terminal, thus it renames your files.
Some hints:
Note the use of =s instead of /s as delimiters for sed substition: it's more readable as you already have /s in your pattern (you could use many other symbols if you don't like =). And in this way you don't have to escape the / in your pattern.
The e command for sed executes the created string.
(I'm speaking of this one below:
sed "s=<title>\(.*\)</title>=mv '$i' '\1'=e" $i
^
)
So use it with caution! I would recommand to first use the line without final e: it won't execute any mv command, but just print instead what would be executed if you were to add the e.

Answer 4

What I read from your question is:
you have a number of text (html) files in a directory
each file contains at least the tag <title> ... </title>
you want to extract the content (elements.text) and use it as filename
last you want to rename that file to the extracted filename
Is this correct?
So, then you need to loop through the files, e.g. with xargs or find
ls '*.txt' | xargs -i\{\} command "{}" ...
find -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*.txt' -exec command "{}" ... \;
I always replace the xargs substitues by -i\{\} because the resulting command is compatible if I use it sometimes with find and its substitute {}.
Next the -maxdepth option will help find not to dive deeper in directory, if no subdir, you can leave it out.
command could be something very simple like echo "Testing File: {}" or a really small script if you use it with bash:
find . -name '*.txt' -exec bash -c 'CUR_FILE="{}"; echo "Working on: $CUR_FILE"; ls -l "$CUR_FILE";' \;
The big decision for your question is: how to get the text from title element.
A simple solution (suitable if opening and closing tag is on same textline) would be by grep
A more solid solution is to use a HTML Parser and navigate by DOM operation
The simple solution base on:
get the title line
remove the everything before and after title content
So do it together:
ls *.txt | xargs -i\{\} bash -c 'TITLE=$(egrep "<title>[^<]*</title>" "{}"); NEW_FNAME=$(echo "$TITLE" | sed -e "s#.*<title>\([^<]*\)</title>.*#\1#"); mv -v "{}" "$NEW_FNAME.txt"'
Same with usage of find:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*.txt' -exec bash -c 'TITLE=$(egrep "<title>[^<]*</title>" "{}"); NEW_FNAME=$(echo "$TITLE" | sed -e "s#.*<title>\([^<]*\)</title>.*#\1#"); mv -v "{}" "$NEW_FNAME.txt"' \;
Hopefully it is what you expected.