Grep string inside double quotes

Question

Trying to grep a string inside double quotes at the moment I use this

grep user file | grep -e "[\'\"]"

This will get to the section of the file I need and highlight the double quotes but it will not give the sting in the double quotes

Gilles Quenot · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-15T14:45:18.480

19

Try doing this :

$ cat aaaa
foo"bar"base
$ grep -oP '"\K[^"\047]+(?=["\047])' aaaa
bar

I use look around advanced regex techniques.

If you want the quotes too :

$ grep -Eo '["\047].*["\047]'
"bar"

Note :

\047

is the octal ascii representation of the single quote

edited Mar 15 '13 at 14:45

answered Mar 15 '13 at 14:37

Gilles Quenot

Thanks it nearly works - the output gets the string as well as ; outside the double quote – Grimlockz Mar 15 '13 at 14:39
Nope just the sting but using the above grep gives me ; as well... try this for example user="bobhope"; – Grimlockz Mar 15 '13 at 14:41
@GillesQuenot How to use inside package.json I cannot use right now in todo script. "img-altchk": "gulp img-altchk", "todo": "grep -lir //" }, – Prashanth Harish Jun 08 '20 at 08:46
Don't use regex to parse JSON but a JSON library – Gilles Quenot Jun 08 '20 at 11:33

score 8 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 15 '13 at 14:43

8

$ cat aaaa
foo"bar"base

$ grep -o '"[^"]\+"'
"bar"

answered Mar 15 '13 at 14:43

Fredrik Pihl

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 15 '13 at 14:41

3

Try:

grep "Test" /tmp/junk | tr '"' ' '

This will remove quotes from the output of grep

Or you could try the following:

grep "Test" /tmp/junk | cut -d '"' -f 2

This will use the quotes as a delimiter. Just specify the field you want to select. This lets you cherry-pick the information you want.

answered Mar 15 '13 at 14:41

Paul Calabro

1

Ironically, both of these yield a blank line when piped onto `grep -o '"[^"]\+"'`, but `grep -Eo '".*"' | tr -d '"'` worked. – Abandoned Cart Jul 09 '14 at 20:36
`cut` is not a good choice here because the information is not separated into fields. The number of quotes in a line could be 1, could be 5, could be none. – SaltyNuts Dec 03 '15 at 17:38

Alan Saldanha · Answer 4 · 2018-11-30T06:01:27.080

0

This worked for me. This will print the data including the double quotes also.

 grep -o '"[^"]\+"' file.txt

If we want to print without double quotes, then we need to pipe the grep output to a sed command.

grep -o '"[^"]\+"' file.txt | sed 's/"//g'

edited Nov 30 '18 at 06:01

answered Nov 30 '18 at 05:54

Alan Saldanha

4 Answers4